ABRAHAM 
LINCOLN 

By  Some  Men  Who  Knew  Him 

BEING  PERSONAL  RECOLLECTIONS  OF 


JUDGE  OWEN  T.  REEVES 
HON.  JAMES  S.  EWING 
COL.  RICHARD  R  MORGAN 
JUDGE  FRANKLIN  BLADES 
JOHN  W.  BUNN 


WITH  INTRODUCTION  BY 

HON.  ISAAC  N.  PHILLIPS 

i 


PUBLISHBD  BY 

PANTAGRAPH  PRINTING  &  STATIONERY  CO. 
BLOOMINGTON,  ILLINOIS 


E451/ 
.\b 
Aft' 


COPYRIGHT,  1910,  BY 

PANTAGRAPH  PRINTING  &  STATIONERY  Co. 
BLOOMINGTON,  ILL. 


To  those  who  have  read  volumes  of  Lincoln 
biographies  in  a  vain  effort  to  form  a  correct 
estimate  of  Lincoln,  the  man,  this  book  is  re 
spectfully  dedicated. 


238186 


PREFACE 

In  the  publication  of  this  unique  little  vol 
ume,  we  are  justified  by  the  fact  that  so  much 
unreliable  information  has  been  published  con 
cerning  Lincoln.  We  feel  a  laudable  ambition 
to.  set  right,  so  far  as  possible,  erroneous  im 
pressions. 

We  have  neither  added  to  nor  taken  from, 
these  personal  recollections  of  honorable  gen 
tlemen  who  lived  the  life  as  Lincoln  lived  it, 
and  who  are,  therefore,  capable  of  arriving  at 
a  fairly  accurate  estimate  of  his  true  character. 

THE  PUBLISHERS. 


INTRODUCTION 

I  am  asked  to  write  an  introduction  to  this 
little  book.  I  confess  I  feel  a  very  considerable 
interest  in  the  subject  of  it  and  am  very  glad  to 
see  it  go  forth  to  the  world.  The  book  represents 
a  praiseworthy  effort  on  the  part  of  its  publishers — 
The  Pantagraph  Printing  &  Stationery  Company, 
of  Bloomington,  Illinois — to  preserve  in  a  perma 
nent  form  some  original  evidence  upon  the  question, 
"What  kind  of  a  man  was  Lincoln?" 

I  know  very  many  people  have  of  late  been 
telling  the  world  what  kind  of  a  man  Lincoln  was, 
and  have  been  relating  many  incidents,  facts  and 
recollections  concerning  him.  On  the  centenary 
of  Lincoln's  birth,  the  newspapers  of  the  country 
were  flooded  with  interviews  and  communications 
from  all  sorts  of  people.  There  are,  in  fact,  very 
few  men  now  living  who  knew  Abraham  Lincoln 
at  all  well,  or  who  saw  much  of  him,  and  who  have 
at  the  same  time  definite  personal  recollections 
concerning  him.  The  recollections  here  given  are 
given  by  persons  who,  I  know,  really  did  know 


INTRODUCTION 

Lincoln.  They  are  likewise  persons  who  would 
not  pretend  to  know  things  they  do  not  know. 

There  were  never  more  than  a  very  few  men  who 
could  at  any  time  pretend  to  have  been  on  terms 
at  all  intimate  with  Lincoln,  because  Lincoln  took 
but  few,  if  any,  into  his  deeper  confidences.  The 
men  whose  recollections  are  given  in  this  book  do 
not  pretend  that  they  were  on  deeply  confidential 
terms  with  Lincoln.  Nobody  living  can  now 
pretend  to  that,  and  the  man  who  does  pretend  to 
it  may  be  generally  set  down  as  mistaken.  The 
men  who  speak  here  have  some  memories  and 
recollections  concerning  Lincoln  and  they  give 
us  these  memories  for  what  they  are  worth. 

It  is  useless  to  assure  readers  that  the  writer 
of  this  introduction  would  never  have  been  active 
in  helping  to  cause  these  recollections  to  be  pub 
lished,  if  he  had  not  believed  that  they  set  forth 
the  real  truth,  so  far  as  they  go,  concerning  Lincoln. 
These  men  were  all  quite  close  friends  of  my  own. 
I  know  each  of  them  to  be  a  man  who  would  not 
pervert  the  truth  in  order  to  make  a  mouthable 
or  amusing  story,  and  I  further  know  that  the 


INTRODUCTION 

memory  of  each  of  these  gentlemen  was,  when  he 
wrote,  very  distinct  and  clear. 

I  am  exceedingly  gratified  to  get  this  testimony 
on  record,  where  the  future  historian  may  find  it, 
for  we  may  be  sure  the  real  life  of  Lincoln  has  not 
yet  been  written,  and,  unless  the  confusion  sur 
rounding  the  subject  shall  clear  up  more  rapidly 
than  it  bids  fair  to  do,  the  real  life  of  Lincoln  will 
not  be  written  for  at  least  another  fifty  years.  It 
will  quite  surely  not  be  written  before  the  gen 
eration  of  men  who  knew  Lincoln  in  life  are  all 
dead  and  gone.  It  was  so  with  Washington,  and 
it  is  going  to  be  so  with  Lincoln.  Washington  was 
so  far  perverted  by  would-be  story  tellers  and 
biographers,  that  only  the  man  who  now  studies 
Washington  very  carefully  really  knows  what  man 
ner  of  man  he  was,  and,  sad  to  say,  the  men  who 
study  his  life  with  care  are  now  very  few.  In  the 
early  period,  he  was  much  belittled  by  busy-bodies 
who  pretended  to  know  all  about  him. 

When  preparations  were  in  progress  in  Blooming - 
ton  for  the  celebration  of  the  centenary  of  Lincoln's 
birthday,  being  on  a  committee  of  the  Grand  Army 


INTRODUCTION 

Post  of  Bloomington  which  had  in  charge  the 
selection  of  speakers,  I  insisted  that  men  should 
be  selected  to  speak  who  had  a  personal  knowledge 
of  Lincoln.  We  already  had  plenty  of  eulogies; 
what  we  needed  was  facts.  I  knew  that  the  men 
who  really  had  valuable  information  were  apt  to 
be  modest  men,  who  would  not  rush  forward  to  be 
interviewed  or  to  make  speeches.  Two  notable 
speeches  that  were  made  at  that  celebration  on  the 
afternoon  of  the  12th  of  February,  1909,  namely, 
that  of  Hon.  Adlai  E.  Stevenson  and  that  of  Judge 
Reuben  M.  Benjamin,  both  of  Bloomington,  have 
already  been  published  in  MacChesney's  book, 
"The  Tribute  of  A  Century,"  and  there  appear 
under  copyright.  Another  speech  from  the  same 
platform  and  on  the  same  occasion  was  made  by 
Judge  Owen  T.  Reeves,  likewise  of  Bloomington 
and  is  included  in  this  book.  Another  address 
setting  forth  some  recollections  of  Lincoln  was 
made  on  the  evening  of  that  day  at  Bloomington 
by  Hon.  James  S.  Ewing,  before  the  Illinois  School 
masters'  Club,  and  that  speech  likewise  is  given 
in  this  book.  At  Pontiac,  Illinois,  where  a  like 

10 


INTRODUCTION 

celebration  was  held  on  the  same  day,  Colonel 
Richard  Price  Morgan,  of  Dwight,  111.,  delivered 
an  address,  giving  some  recollections  of  Lincoln, 
and  Col.  Morgan's  address  is  also  printed  here* 
At  my  special  solicitation  Judge  Franklin  Blades, 
of  Pomona,  California,  wrote  out  his  recollections 
of  Lincoln,  which  will  be  found  very  interesting 
and  are  included  here. 

I  venture  to  call  special  attention  to  the  set  of 
resolutions,  written  by  Lincoln,  and  passed  by  the 
Illinois  legislature  in  January,  1861,  as  related  by 
Judge  Blades.  These  have  hitherto  escaped  atten 
tion.  Judge  Blades,  I  am  proud  to  say,  has  long 
been  my  personal  friend.  His  testimony  on  the 
question  of  the  authorship  of  these  resolutions  is 
absolutely  conclusive.  I  know  him  to  be  as 
conscientious  a  man  as  ever  lived,  exceedingly 
careful  not  to  state  more  than  he  knows. 

John  W.  Bunn,  of  Springfield,  Illinois,  is  well 
known  to  be  about  the  last  survivor  in  Springfield 
who  knew  Lincoln  well  before  the  war,  and,  at  my 
special  solicitation,  he  has  written  out  some  of  his 
recollections  of  Lincoln,  and  it  is  a  great  pleasure 

11 


INTRODUCTION 

to  me  to  present  them  in  this  book.  I  regard  Mr. 
Bunn  as  really  the  best  authority  upon  Lincoln 
in  the  period  before  the  Civil  War. 

Much  has  been  said  about  Lincoln's  supposed 
propensity  to  spin  yarns  and  tell  doubtful  anec 
dotes.  That  Lincoln  was  a  sort  of  fabulist  and 
illustrated  his  points  by  incidents  and  remembered 
happenings,  is  true,  but  biographers,  and  particu 
larly  would-be  "old  familiar  friends"  have  so  greatly 
over-stated  Lincoln's  story  telling  propensity  that 
it  is  well  that  men  who  really  knew  him  well 
and  can  be  relied  upon  to  state  facts,  should  be 
heard  on  the  subject. 

Another  class  of  writers  have  seemed  exceedingly 
anxious  to  make  it  appear  that  Lincoln  came 
literally  from  nothing.  The  Bible  tells  us  that 
men  do  not  gather  figs  from  thistles,  but  some  of 
the  biographers  would  have  us  believe  that  this 
saying  of  the  Holy  Writ  does  not  apply  to  Lincoln. 
Many  of  them  make  a  special  point  of  belittling 
and  discrediting  his  parents  and  ancestors  in  order 
to  produce  a  striking  contrast  for  the  purpose  of 
eulogy.  Such  persons  are,  in  nearly  every  in- 

12 


INTRODUCTION 

stance,  animated  more  by  a  desire  to  attract  atten 
tion  to  themselves  than  by  a  desire  to  really  depict 
the  great  man  who  lived,  worked  and  aspired,  out 
here  in  Illinois,  and  who  at  last  attained  to  the  hard 
but  glorious  privilege  of  martyrdom  for  his  cause. 

Isaac  N.  Phillips. 


Personal  Recollections 
and  Estimates  of  Lincoln 

OWEN       T.        REEVES 


IS 


JUDGE  OWEN  T.  REEVES 

Judge  Owen  T.  ReeVes  was  born  December  18, 
1829,  in  Ross  County,  Ohio.  He  was  graduated 
from  the  Ohio  Wesleyan  University  in  1850,  and 
three  years  later  received  from  that  University 
the  degree  of  Master  of  Arts.  In  1 888  he  received 
the  degree  of  L.L.D.  from  Monmouth  College,  in 
Illinois.  From  1850  to  1854  he  was  engaged  in 
teaching.  He  came  to  Bloomington,  Illinois,  in 
October,  1 854,  which  place  has  since  been  his  home. 
Judge  Reeves  was  admitted  to  the  bar  before  leaving 
Ohio  and  commenced  the  practice  of  the  law  when 
he  settled  at  Bloomington.  In  1861  he  was  ap 
pointed  city  clerk  and  city  attorney  of  Blooming- 
ton.  He  was  elected  a  circuit  judge  March  1, 
1877,  and  remained  on  the  bench  until  June,  1891. 
The  last  three  years  of  his  judicial  service  he  was, 
by  assignment  of  the  Illinois  Supreme  Court,  a 
judge  of  the  Illinois  Appellate  Court  for  the  Fourth 
District.  Since  1891  he  has  been  Dean  of  the 
Bloomington  Law  School.  In  the  Civil  War  he 
was  Colonel  of  the  70th  Illinois  Infantry.  Judge 
Reeves  was  one  of  the  most  impartial  and  most 
clear-headed  judges  that  ever  held  a  nisi  prius 
court,  as  the  lawyers  who  practiced  before  him 

will  universally  testify. 

16 


JUDGE  OWEN  T.  REEVES 


Personal  Recollections 
and  Estimates  of  Lincoln 


OWEN  T.  REEVES 

I  recall  with  marked  distinctness  my  im 
pressions  on  my  first  meeting  Mr.  Lincoln 
in  March,  1855.  I  had  heard  much  of  him 
before  I  met  him.  His  candidacy  for  the 
United  States  Senate  before  the  General 
Assembly  in  January,  1855,  had  focused 
my  attention  upon  him.  The  unusual  com 
plimentary  comments  by  those  who  had 
known  him  many  years  —  some  of  whom 
were  directly  opposed  to  him  politically — 
riveted  my  attention  to  this  unusual  man. 
No  wonder,  then,  that  when  I  met  him  I 
was  specially  attracted  to  a  careful  analysis 
of  how  he  impressed  me,  and  that  this  analy 
sis  is  still  distinct  in  memory. 

17 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Speaking  generally,  I  may  say  that  I  now 
recall  clearly  that  I  was  deeply  impressed 
with  the  fact  that  I  had  met  a  man  widely 
different  from  the  ordinary  man  of  distinc 
tion.  There  was  something,  just  what  not 
clearly  defined,  in  him,  that  stamped  him  in 
my  conception  as  a  man  of  marked  superior 
ity  intellectually. 

Lincoln's  personality  was  to  me  a  revela 
tion,  different  from  any  other  personality  I 
had  ever  tried  to  measure  and  comprehend, 
although  it  had  been  my  good  fortune  in 
prior  years  to  have  had  personal  relations 
with  a  goodly  number  of  men  of  wide  and 
well-merited  distinction.  He  had  an  individ 
uality  that  was  singularly  impressive.  Alto 
gether,  the  problem  of  his  true  measure  as  a 
man  was  complex  and  not  easy  of  solution. 
To  me  Mr.  Lincoln  was  a  continuous  study, 
and  the  farther  the  study  was  carried,  the 

18 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

higher  the  estimate  of  him  arose  until,  to  me, 
he  stood  out  as  a  veritable  marvel  among 
men. 

From  March,  1 855,  to  the  Spring  of 
1 860,  I  met  Mr.  Lincoln  often  and  became 
quite  intimately  acquainted  with  him.  He 
attended  all  of  the  sessions  of  the  McLean 
County  Circuit  Court  during  that  period.  I 
heard  him  try  many  cases — some  of  large 
importance,  and  many  ordinary  cases.  I 
recall  his  assisting  the  State's  Attorney  in 
the  prosecution  of  one  Wyatt  for  murder,  a 
hard-fought  case  in  which  Leonard  Swett 
succeeded  in  acquitting  Wyatt  of  murder, 
on  the  ground  of  insanity.  He  appeared 
for  plaintiff,  Meshach  Pike,  in  a  suit  to  set 
aside  the  sale  of  the  Pike  Hotel  at  Bloom- 
ington,  on  the  ground  of  fraud  on  the  part 
of  the  purchaser.  Judge  T.  L.  Dickey,  of 
Ottawa,  and  local  attorneys  appeared  for 

19 


LINCOLN     —      By      MEN 

the  defense,  and  Lincoln  won  out.  He  de 
fended  a  chancery  suit  in  which  I  appeared 
for  complainant,  by  which  it  was  sought  to 
set  aside  a  sale  of  school  lands,  which  re 
sulted  in  favor  of  the  defendant.  He  rep 
resented  the  Illinois  Central  Railroad  Com 
pany  in  its  suit,  contesting  the  validity  of  an 
assessment  by  the  county  of  McLean  of 
county  taxes  against  the  railroad  company, 
in  which  he  was  successful  in  defeating  the 
tax.  This  suit  settled  the  non-liability  of  the 
Illinois  Central  Railroad  Company  for  local 
taxes  for  the  full  period  of  its  charter. 

Lincoln  was  engaged  during  this  period 
in  the  trial  of  a  great  variety  of  cases,  his 
employment  being  sufficient  to  maintain  his 
presence  in  court  practically  during  the  en 
tire  sessions  of  the  court. 

It  is  not  my  purpose,  in  the  brief  time  al 
lotted  me,  to  speak  further  of  Lincoln  as  a 

20 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

lawyer.  Referring  to  Lincoln's  personal 
characteristics,  I  will  say  that  to  portray  Lin 
coln  as  ill-mannered,  uncouth,  unrefined  in 
sentiment,  the  indulger  of  vulgarity  of  speech, 
a  buffoon  and  yarn-spinner,  is  a  complete 
and  outrageous  caricature,  as  I  knew  him. 
His  mind,  in  all  its  serious  moods,  which 
was  its  prevailing  condition,  was  occupied 
by  lofty  thoughts  upon  subjects  of  the  high 
est  concern,  developing  a  philosophy  of  life 
in  all  its  myriad  phases,  based  upon  sound 
reason  and  exalted  conceptions. 

I  heard  Lincoln  tell  hundreds  of  anec 
dotes  and  stories,  but  never  one  that  was  not 
told  to  illustrate  or  give  point  to  some  sub 
ject  or  question  that  had  been  the  theme  of 
conversation,  or  that  was  not  suggested  by 
an  anecdote  or  story  told  by  someone  else. 
This  fact  found  an  apt  illustration,  when 
Lincoln  was  asked  what  he  thought  of 

21 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Hood's  army  after  its  sweeping  defeat  at 
the  battle  of  Nashville,  Term.,  by  General 
Thomas.  Lincoln  said  the  question  remind 
ed  him  of  the  story  of  an  Illinois  farmer 
who  had  been  sorely  annoyed  by  a  maraud 
ing  dog.  The  farmer  procured  a  piece  of 
meat  into  which  there  was  put  a  powerful 
explosive,  and  placed  the  meat  in  the  path 
that  the  dog  would  take  to  reach  the  place 
where  his  usual  depredations  were  commit 
ted.  He  tied  a  string,  saturated  with  gaso 
line,  to  the  piece  of  meat  and  took  a  position 
behind  a  tree  from  which  he  could  see  the 
dog  as  he  approached.  He  fired  the  string 
in  time  to  reach  the  meat  at  the  same  time 
as  the  dog.  The  result  was  the  dog  gulped 
the  meat  and  instantly  there  was  an  explo 
sion.  When  the  farmer  was  asked  what  was 
the  effect  on  the  dog,  he  replied,  "That  dog, 
as  a  dog,  will  not  ever  again  amount  to 

22 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

much."  So  Lincoln's  answer  to  the  question 
asked  him  was,  "I  don't  think  Hood's  army, 
as  an  arm];,  will  hereafter  amount  to  much." 
A  short  time  ago,  I  came  across  a  state 
ment  said  to  have  been  made  by  Lincoln, 
during  the  war,  when  challenged  to  tell  a 
story.  He  said:  "I  believe  I  have  the  popu 
lar  reputation  of  being  a  story-teller,  but  I 
do  not  deserve  the  name  in  any  general 
sense;  for  it  is  not  the  story  itself,  but  its 
purpose  or  effect,  that  interests  me.  I  often 
avoid  a  long  and  useless  discussion  by  others, 
or  a  laborious  explanation  on  my  own  part, 
by  a  short  story  that  illustrates  my  point  of 
view.  So,  too,  the  sharpness  of  a  refusal  or 
the  edge  of  a  rebuke  may  be  blunted  by  an 
appropriate  story  so  as  to  save  wounded  feel 
ing  and  yet  serve  the  purpose.  No,  I  am 
not  simply  a  story-teller,  but  story-telling  as 
an  emollient  saves  me  much  friction  and  dis- 

M 

tress. 

23 


LINCOLN     —     By     MEN 

Lincoln  was  the  apostle  of  the  common 
people.  Their  rights,  their  conditions,  their 
hardships,  their  opportunities,  their  aspira 
tions,  their  hopes,  their  joys,  their  sorrows — 
all  these  were  subjects  upon  which  his  mind 
brooded  and  sought  to  work  out  plans  for 
their  betterment  and  happiness.  No  man  I 
ever  met  knew  the  common  people  better 
than  he,  or  was  in  closer  sympathy  with 
them.  Having  sprung  from  the  innumerable 
common  throng,  his  heart  never  ceased  to 
beat  in  sympathy  with  them.  Besides,  he 
was  endowed  with  that  best  sense — common 
sense.  This,  with  his  broad,  clear  grasp  of 
every  subject  that  touched  the  interests  of  the 
masses,  made  him  pre-eminently  the  advo 
cate  of  the  rights  of  the  common  people. 

Up  to  the  time  of  the  repeal  of  the  Mis 
souri  Compromise  in  1 854,  Lincoln  had  not 
become  recognized  as  a  great  leader  in  mat- 

24 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

ters  of  state.  He  had  been  active  as  a 
Whig  on  the  stump,  and  had  served  one 
term  in  Congress,  besides  a  number  of  terms 
in  the  legislature,  but,  practically,  after  the 
close  of  his  term  in  Congress,  he  returned  to 
the  practice  of  law,  and  devoted  himself 
almost  exclusively  to  his  profession.  The 
repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  made 
quite  an  upheaval  in  political  parties  and 
started  a  new  movement. 

Lincoln  at  an  early  date  became  settled 
in  the  conviction  that  human  slavery  was 
both  in  the  abstract  and  concrete,  morally 
wrong.  While  this  conviction  grew  with 
the  years,  he  recognized  that  slavery,  as  it 
existed  in  the  Southern  States,  was  pro 
tected  by  the  Constitution,  and  any  interfer 
ence  with  slavery  as  it  existed  in  the  South 
was  unwarranted  and  could  not  be  supported 
simply  by  a  belief  that  it  rvas  wrong.  Hence, 

25 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

he  refused  to  co-operate  with  what  was 
known  as  the  Abolition  party,  and  had  no 
sympathy  with  its  doctrines.  However, 
while  this  was  true,  he  was  always  unalter 
ably  opposed  to  the  extension  of  slavery  into 
the  territories.  He  had  clearly  worked  out, 
in  his  consideration  of  the  subject  of  slavery 
as  it  existed  in  the  Southern  States,  that,  so 
far  as  its  continued  existence  there  was  in 
volved,  there  was  no  power  outside  of  those 
States  to  interfere  with  it,  but  while  this  was 
true  and  to  be  conscientiously  observed, 
there  was  no  reason  why  opposition  might 
not  be  made  to  its  extension  into  the  terri 
tories  of  the  United  States. 

Lincoln  went  a  step  farther  in  his  speech 
at  Springfield  in  June,  1858,  in  which  he 
declared:  "A  house  divided  against  itself 
cannot  stand.  I  believe  that  this  Govern 
ment  cannot  endure  permanently  half-slave 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

and  half-free.  I  do  not  expect  the  Union 
to  be  dissolved — I  do  not  expect  the  house 
to  fall — but  I  do  expect  it  will  cease  to  be 
divided.  It  will  become  all  one  thing  or  all 
the  other.  Either  the  opponents  of  slavery 
will  arrest  the  further  spread  of  it  and  place 
it  where  the  public  mind  shall  rest  in  the 
belief  that  it  is  in  the  course  of  ultimate  ex 
tinction,  or  its  advocates  will  push  it  for 
ward  till  it  shall  become  alike  lawful  in  all 
the  States,  old  as  well  as  new,  North  as  well 
as  South.'* 

This  prediction  of  his  was  predicated 
upon  his  belief  that  the  conviction  of  the 
great  wrong  of  slavery  would  in  time  work 
out,  in  some  way,  its  extinction;  either  that 
or  the  opinions  of  men  would  change  as  to 
the  moral  character  of  slavery,  so  that  it 
would  come  into  use  the  country  over — 
plainly  his  belief  was  that  the  sentiment 

27 


LINCOLN     —     By      MEN 

against  slavery  would  not  cease,  but  con 
tinue  to  grow,  and,  eventually,  would  work 
out  the  ultimate  extinction  of  slavery. 

Most  naturally,  with  his  deep-seated  con 
viction  on  the  subject  of  slavery,  Lincoln  at 
once  became  absorbed  in  the  questions 
which  sprung  out  of  the  repeal  of  the  Mis 
souri  Compromise,  and  he  at  once  became  a 
leader  of  the  forces  that  opposed  this  repeal. 
October  third,  1 854,  Douglas,  at  the  State 
Fair  in  Springfield,  made  his  great  speech 
in  defense  of  the  Kansas  and  Nebraska  bill 
which  repealed  the  Missouri  Compromise, 
and  by  which  Judge  Douglas  introduced  his 
doctrine  of  popular  sovereignty,  under  which 
the  people  in  the  territories  were  left  to  de 
cide  whether  they  would  have  slavery  or 
not.  October  fourth,  1854,  Lincoln,  at  the 
same  fair,  replied  to  Judge  Douglas,  con 
tending  that  by  the  Missouri  Compromise, 

28 


WHO        KNEW        HIM 

which  covered  the  territory  of  Kansas  and 
Nebraska,  they  had  been  solemnly  dedi 
cated  to  freedom,  and  slavery  prohibited 
therein. 

On  October  third,  1 854,  what  was  called 
an  Anti-Nebraska  Convention  was  held  at 
Springfield,  at  which  twenty-six  delegates 
were  present,  mostly  well  known  Abolition 
ists.  Lincoln  declined  to  attend  this  con 
vention,  as  he  was  not  in  sympathy  with  the 
doctrines  of  the  Abolitionists.  Moses,  in  his 
history  of  Illinois,  says  that  Lincoln  met 
Douglas  in  joint  debate  in  October,  1854, 
but  does  not  state  where,  and  that  he  fol 
lowed  Douglas  at  Peoria  and  other  places. 

Lincoln  was  elected  to  the  Legislature 
from  Sangamon  County  in  the  fall  of  1854. 
When  the  returns  of  the  election  were  made, 
and  it  was  shown  that  the  opponents  of  the 
repeal  of  the  Missouri  Compromise  were  in 

29 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

the  ascendancy  in  the  General  Assembly, 
as  Lincoln  was  recognized  as  the  leader  in 
the  Anti-Nebraska  movement  and  the  prob 
able  candidate  for  United  States  Senator  to 
succeed  Judge  Breese,  he  declined  to  accept 
his  credentials  as  a  member  of  the  Legis 
lature,  and  a  special  election  was  held  to 
fill  the  vacancy. 

When  the  General  Assembly  proceeded 
to  the  election  of  a  United  States  senator, 
it  was  found  that  five  of  the  Anti-Nebraska 
forces  were  old-time  Democrats,  and  they 
refused  to  vote  for  Lincoln,  who  had  always 
been  a  Whig.  The  result  was  that,  in  order 
to  elect  a  senator  who  was  opposed  to  the 
Kansas-Nebraska  bill,  Lincoln's  friends,  at 
his  special  instance,  voted  for  Trumbull, 
who  had  always  been  a  Democrat.  The 
election  of  Trumbull  to  the  Senate  still  left 
Lincoln  the  leader  of  the  party  in  Illinois. 

30 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

His  correspondence  with  Judge  Trum- 
bull,  lately  published  in  a  leading  magazine, 
demonstrates  that  Lincoln  kept  his  finger  on 
the  pulse  of  public  sentiment  and  suggested 
the  course  to  be  pursued  by  the  party  in  Illi 
nois.  In  May,  1856,  the  first  Illinois  Re 
publican  State  Convention  was  held  in 
Bloomington.  Lincoln  was  the  central  fig 
ure  in  that  convention  and  made,  what  all 
who  heard  it  pronounced,  the  greatest  speech 
of  his  life.  Most  unfortunately,  the  speech 
was  not  reported  and  is  now  known  as  the 
"Lost  Speech."  I  heard  the  speech  and 
have  read  what  purports  to  be  the  speech, 
as  reproduced  by  Mr.  Whitney,  and  must 
say  that  the  reproduction  does  not  strike  me 
as  being  in  any  sense  the  speech  which  Lin 
coln  made  and  which  I  heard. 

I  must  hasten  to  speak  briefly  of  the  cam 
paign  of  1858.  The  Republican  State 

31 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Convention  was  held  at  Springfield,  June 
16,  1858,  which  nominated  Lincoln  for 
United  States  senator.  It  was  at  this  con 
vention  that  he  made  the  speech  containing 
the  words  above  quoted :  "A  house  divided 
against  itself  cannot  stand,"  etc. 

Moses,  in  history,  says  that  when  this 
speech  was  prepared  it  was  submitted  by 
Lincoln  to  his  friends,  and  they  all  opposed 
that  part  of  the  speech.  Lincoln  said  to 
them:  "The  time  has  come  when  these 
sentiments  should  be  uttered,  and  if  it  is 
decreed  that  I  should  go  down  because  of 
this  speech,  then  let  me  go  down  linked  to 
the  truth — let  me  die  in  the  advocacy  of 
what  is  just  and  right." 

In  July,  1858,  Douglas  made  his  first 
speech  in  the  campaign  of  1 858,  at  Chicago, 
from  the  balcony  of  the  Tremont  House, 
in  which  he  vigorously  attacked  Lincoln's 

32 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

speech  before  the  Republican  Convention 
at  Springfield  in  June.  The  next  night  Lin 
coln  replied  to  Judge  Douglas  from  the 
same  place.  July  1 6,  1 858,  Judge  Douglas 
left  Chicago  for  Springfield,  and  is  reported 
to  have  spoken  at  Bloomington  en  route; 
and  on  July  1 7,  1 858,  he  delivered  a  set 
speech  at  Springfield,  to  which  Lincoln  re 
plied  the  next  day.  July  24,  Lincoln  chal 
lenged  Douglas  to  joint  debate,  which  a 
week  later  was  accepted  by  Douglas  and 
arrangements  for  the  joint  debates  con 
cluded. 

The  first  debate  occurred  at  Ottawa, 
August  21,  1858.  At  this  time,  Judge 
Douglas  propounded  seven  questions  to  be 
answered  by  Lincoln  at  the  next  debate, 
to  be  held  at  Freeport.  Before  the  Free- 
port  meeting,  Lincoln  held  a  conference  in 
Bloomington  with  his  friends,  at  which  he 

33 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

submitted  his  answers  to  Judge  Douglas* 
questions.  As  to  these  there  was  no  contro 
versy.  Then  Lincoln  announced  to  his 
friends  that  he  proposed,  at  the  Freeport 
meeting,  to  submit  to  Judge  Douglas  four 
questions,  the  principal  one  as  follows :  "Can 
the  people  in  any  territory,  by  any  lawful 
means,  against  the  wishes  of  any  citizen  of 
the  United  States,  exclude  Slavery  from  the 
territory,  prior  to  its  admission  as  a  State?" 
Lincoln's  friends,  except  Jesse  W.  Fell,  in 
sisted  that  Judge  Douglas  would  answer  the 
question  in  a  way  that  would  certainly 
result  in  his  election  to  the  Senate  and  defeat 
Lincoln,  to  which  Lincoln  only  replied  that 
if  he  did  so  answer,  he  could  never  be  presi 
dent,  and  he,  Lincoln,  regarded  the  battle 
of  1 860  for  the  presidency  as  infinitely  more 
important  than  the  senatorship. 

It  should  be  remembered  that  before  this 

34 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

time  the  Dred  Scott  decision  had  been  ren 
dered  by  the  United  States  Supreme  Court, 
which  held  that  slave-holders  had  the  right 
to  take  with  them  into  any  territory  of  the 
United  States,  their  slaves,  and  hold  them 
there  so  long  as  the  territory  remained  a 
territory.  Judge  Douglas  did  reply  as  Lin 
coln's  friends  anticipated,  that  the  Legis 
lature  of  a  Territory,  by  unfriendly  legis 
lation,  might  practically  exclude  slavery — 
that  this  was  but  carrying  out  his  doctrine  of 
popular  sovereignty.  Of  course,  this  was 
in  direct  conflict  with  the  Dred  Scott  deci 
sion,  and  this  answer  of  Judge  Douglas  was 
spread  broadcast  over  the  South.  The  re 
sult  was  the  secession  of  the  South  from  the 
Democratic  National  Convention  of  1860, 
and,  in  the  end,  the  defeat  of  Judge  Douglas 
for  the  presidency. 

Judge  Douglas,  in  the  House  of  Repre- 

35 


LINCOLN      —     By      MEN 

sentatives,  and  in  the  United  States  Senate, 
had  established  a  national  reputation  as  a 
debater.  No  man  was  better  furnished  with 
the  weapons  of  debate,  or  exhibited  more 
skill  in  their  use,  than  he.  On  the  other 
hand,  Mr.  Lincoln  had  only  a  State  repu 
tation,  extending,  perhaps,  to  some  of  the 
adjoining  States,  but  no  national  reputation 
as  a  debater.  In  Illinois,  Lincoln  had  the 
reputation  of  a  logical  debater.  He  had 
already  measured  swords  with  Judge  Doug 
las,  and  each  had  received  a  taste  of  the 
other's  metal.  Doubtless,  Judge  Douglas* 
nation-wide  reputation  attracted  marked 
attention  to  the  debate  the  country  over,  and 
thereby  Mr.  Lincoln  was  brought  into  a  na 
tional  notoriety  and  prominence  which  later, 
in  1860,  resulted  in  his  nomination  by  the 
Republican  party  as  its  candidate  for  the 
presidency. 

36 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

No  sketch  of  Mr.  Lincoln  can  be  in  any 
sense  adequate  which  does  not  deal  with  his 
astonishing  power  over  words.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  of  him,  that  he  is  among  the 
greatest  masters  of  prose  ever  produced  by 
the  English  race.  On  this  subject  of  Lin 
coln's  power  of  expression,  I  will  quote  from 
a  writer  of  the  highest  standing,  a  portrayal 
of  the  characteristics  which  gave  to  Lincoln 
his  classic  style  of  expression,  that  will,  for 
all  time,  be  the  envy  of  those  who  strive  for 
excellence  in  speech. 

"The  most  striking  characteristic  of  Lin 
coln's  style  may  be  found  in  the  record  from 
the  beginning.  Candor  was  a  trait  of  the 
man  and  not  less  of  his  verbal  manner.  His 
natural  honesty  of  character,  his  desire  to 
make  his  meaning  clear,  literally  to  demon 
strate  what  he  believed  to  be  the  truth  with 
mathematical  precision — this  gave  to  his  ex 
pression  both  attractiveness  and  force.  The 
simplicity  of  his  nature,  his  lack  of  self- 


V 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

consciousness  and  vanity,  tended  to  simplic 
ity  and  directness  of  diction. 

An  eminent  lawyer  has  said — perhaps 
with  exaggeration — that,  without  the  mas 
sive  reasoning  of  Webster  or  the  resplendent 
rhetoric  of  Burke,  Lincoln  exceeded  them 
both  in  his  faculty  of  statement.  His  style 
was  affected,  too,  by  the  personal  traits  of 
consideration  of  those  of  a  contrary  mind, 
his  toleration  and  large  human  sympathy. 
But  Lincoln's  style  might  have  had  all  these 
qualities  and  yet  not  have  carried  as  it  did. 
Beyond  these  traits  comes  the  miracle — the 
cadence  of  his  prose  and  its  traits  of  pathos 
and  of  imagination.  Lincoln's  prose,  at  its 
height  and  when  his  spirit  was  stirred  by 
aspiration  and  resolve,  affects  the  soul  like 
noble  music.  That  is  the  strain  in  the  two 
inaugurals,  in  the  Gettysburg  address,  and 
in  his  letter  of  consolation  to  a  bereaved 
mother,  which  moves  the  hearts  of  genera 
tion  after  generation. 

"Lincoln's  power  of  expression  was  evi 
dently  one  of  the  most  effective  elements  of 
his  leadership.  The  sympathy  and  tolera 
tion  which  made  his  writings  and  speeches  so 
persuasive,  assisted  his  leadership  not  only 

38 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

in  convincing  his  listeners  and  in  endearing 
him,  the  leader,  to  individuals  and  the 
masses,  but  helped  him  as  a  statesman  to 
take  large  and  humane  views  and  to  adopt 
measures  in  keeping  with  these  views.  To 
that  sympathy  and  that  toleration  a  reunited 
country  is  under  constant  obligation,  not 
merely  for  the  result  of  a  successfully  con 
ducted  war — successful  in  the  true  interests 
of  both  antagonists — but  for  the  continuing 
possibility  of  good  feeling  between  the  sec 
tions.  To  think  that  in  the  preparatory  po 
litical  struggle  and  during  the  four  years  of 
the  hideous  conflict,  Abraham  Lincoln, 
though  his  spirit  was  strained  almost  beyond 
human  endurance  by  the  hallssments  of  his 
position,  though  misunderstood  and  foully 
calumniated  by  public  antagonists,  and 
thwarted  and  plotted  against  by  some  of 
his  own  supporters,  uttered  not  one  word  of 
violence  or  rancor — not  a  phrase  which,  after 
the  cessation  of  hostilities,  might  return  to 
embitter  the  defeated  combatants  or  be  re 
sented  by  their  descendants!" 

I   will   close   this   brief   sketch   with   the 
closing    sentence    of    the    estimate    of    Mr. 

39 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Lincoln  by  Mr.  Herndon,  his  long-time  law 
partner:  "Take  him  all  in  all,  he  was  one 
of  the  best,  wisest,  greatest  and  noblest  of 
men  in  all  the  ages." 


40 


Speech  of 
Hon.  James  S.  Ewing 


HON.  JAMES  S.  EWING 

James  S.  Ewing  was  born  in  1835,  in  territory 
then  a  part  of  McLean  County,  but  now  included 
in  Woodford  County,  Illinois.  In  1840  his  father, 
long  a  leading  business  man,  removed  to  Bloom- 
ington  and  was  at  one  time  mayor  of  that  city.  Mr. 
Ewing  prepared  for  college  at  a  school  called 
Jubilee  College,  situated  in  Peoria  County.  Later 
he  graduated  from  Center  College  at  Danville, 
Kentucky.  He  read  law  at  Bloomington  and  was 
admitted  to  practice  in  January,  1859,  after  which 
he  spent  a  year  in  the  office  of  Hon.  John  C.  Bullitt, 
a  leading  attorney  of  Philadelphia,  and,  while  in 
the  latter  city,  he  attended  a  course  of  law  lectures. 
Since  that  time  Mr.  Ewing  has  practiced  law  at 
Bloomington,  Illinois,  with  the  exception  of  four 
years,  during  which  time — 1893-1897 — he  was 
United  States  Minister  to  Belgium.  He  has  al 
ways  been  a  democrat,  and  always  active  in  State 
and  National  politics,  but  was  never  a  candidate 
for  any  political  office.  Mr.  Ewing  is  still  living 
at  Bloomington,  Illinois. 


__ 

HON.  JAMES  S.  EWING 


Speech  of 
Hon.  James  S.  Ewing 

At  the  Banquet  oi  the  Illinois  Schoolmasters* 
Club,  Bloomington,  Feb.  12,  19O9 


Mr.  Toastmaster  and  Gentlemen: 

During  the  years  1844  and  1845,  my 
father,  Mr.  John  W.  Ewing,  was  the  pro 
prietor  of  the  old  National  Hotel,  on  Front 
street,  in  the  city  of  Bloomington.  At  that 
time  circuit  courts  were  held  in  McLean 
county,  twice  a  year,  and  there  were  a  num 
ber  of  lawyers  from  other  counties  who 
usually  attended  these  terms.  Amongst 
those  whom  I  specially  remember  as  com 
ing  from  Springfield,  and  who  were  guests 
at  my  father's  house,  were  Hon.  James 
McDougal,  afterward  a  Senator  from  Cali 
fornia;  Mr.  John  T.  Stuart,  and  Abraham 
Lincoln.  I  thus  became  acquainted  with 

45 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Mr.  Lincoln,  and  I  continued  to  know  him, 
as  a  boy  knows  a  distinguished  man  whom 
he  often  meets,  until  1860,  when  he  was 
elected  President  of  the  United  States. 

Mr.  Lincoln  was  fond  of  children.  At 
least  he  knew  many  of  the  boys  and  girls 
of  the  village,  the  children  of  his  older 
friends,  and  often  talked  to  them  and  ex 
pressed  an  interest  in  their  welfare.  They 
liked  Mr.  Lincoln,  and  most  of  the  boys  in 
the  town  knew  him  and  many  of  them  talked 
to  him,  as  we  all  thought,  on  most  intimate 
terms. 

In  1844,  Mr.  Lincoln  was  thirty-five 
years  of  age,  in  the  very  prime  of  his 
younger  manhood,  and  during  the  follow 
ing  fifteen  years  (except  one  term  of  service 
in  Congress)  he  "traveled  the  circuit,"  de 
voting  most  of  his  time  to  the  practice  of  the 
law.  When  I  first  knew  anything  of  courts, 

46 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

Hon.  Samuel  H.  Treat  was  the  presiding 
judge  of  this  circuit.  He  was  afterward 
appointed  to  the  Federal  bench,  and  the 
Hon.  David  Davis  became  his  successor  and 
continued  as  the  circuit  judge  until  appointed 
by  Mr.  Lincoln  as  an  associate  justice  of  the 
Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States.  It 
was  then  the  habit  for  such  lawyers  as  pos 
sessed  sufficient  experience  and  ability  to  at 
tract  a  clientage  to  follow  the  court  around 
the  circuit.  Mr.  Lincoln  was  of  this  num 
ber  and  more  than  perhaps  any  other  was 
most  constant  and  unremitting  in  his  attend 
ance. 

During  these  fifteen  years,  with  the  eager 
curiosity  of  a  boy,  I  was  a  frequent  attendant 
in  the  court  room,  and  heard  Mr.  Lincoln 
try  a  great  many  law  suits.  The  suits  them 
selves  often  dealt  with  trivial  matters,  but 
great  men  were  engaged  in  them.  Mr.  Lin- 

47 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

coin  was  engaged  in  most  of  the  suits  of 
any  importance.  He  was  wonderfully  suc 
cessful.  He  was  a  master  in  all  that  went 
to  make  up  what  was  called  a  "jury  law 
yer.'*  His  wonderful  power  of  clear  and 
logical  statement  seemed  the  beginning  and 
the  end  of  the  case.  After  his  statement  of 
the  law  and  the  facts  in  any  particular  case, 
we  wondered  either  how  the  plaintiff  came 
to  bring  such  a  suit  or  how  the  defendant 
could  be  such  a  fool  as  to  defend  it.  By 
the  time  the  jury  was  selected,  each  mem 
ber  of  it  felt  that  the  great  lawyer  was  his 
friend  and  v/as  relying  upon  him  as  a  juror 
to  see  that  no  injustice  was  done.  Mr.  Lin 
coln's  ready,  homely,  but  always  pertinent, 
illustrations  and  anecdotes  could  not  be  re 
sisted.  Few  men  ever  lived  who  knew,  as 
he  did,  the  mainsprings  of  action,  secret  mo 
tive,  the  passions,  prejudices  and  inclina- 

48 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

tions  which  inspired  the  actions  of  men,  and 
he  played  on  the  human  heart  as  a  master 
on  an  instrument. 

This  power  over  a  jury  was,  however,  the 
least  of  his  claims  to  be  entitled  a  good  law 
yer.  He  was  masterful  in  a  legal  argument 
before  the  court.  His  knowledge  of  the 
general  principles  of  the  law  was  extensive 
and  accurate,  and  his  mind  was  so  clear  and 
logical  that  he  seldom  made  a  mistake  in 
their  application.  Courteous  to  the  court, 
fair  to  his  opponent,  and  modest  and  re 
strained  in  his  assertions,  he  was  certainly 
the  model  lawyer. 

As  for  myself,  I  decided  I  would  be  a 
lawyer,  and  that  I  would  be  just  such  a  law 
yer  as  Mr.  Lincoln  was.  Well,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  I  didn't  become  just  such  a  lawyer. 
My  failure  in  that  regard,  to  my  friends, 
was  a  regret  rather  than  a  surprise.  I  was 

49 


LINCOLN     —      By      MEN 

like  a  rather  frothy  young  friend  of  mine, 
who  had  been  to  hear  Bishop  Spaulding 
preach,  and,  inspired  by  the  eloquence  of 
the  great  preacher,  imparted  to  me  in  con 
fidence  that  "if  he  had  his  life  to  live  over, 
he  would  be  a  bishop." 

While  my  great  ambition  fell  so  far  short 
of  realization,  yet  of  one  thing  I  am  sure — 
success  was  very  much  nearer  by  reason  of 
the  high  ideals  I  imbibed  from  Lincoln.  I 
believe  that  every  young  lawyer  then  at  the 
Bloomington  bar  became  a  better  lawyer 
on  account  of  Mr.  Lincoln's  example. 

I  heard  Mr.  Lincoln  make  a  number  of 
political  speeches.  I  heard  his  speech  in  the 
old  court  house  in  1 854,  on  the  Kansas  and 
Nebraska  bill,  in  answer  to  the  speech  of 
Mr.  Douglas  on  the  same  subject,  made  a 
few  days  before.  In  this  speech,  what  im 
pressed  me  most  was  that  same  wonderful 

50 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

power  of  statement  to  which  I  have  before 
referred.  I  can  never  forget  the  manner  in 
which  he  stated  the  causes  and  events  which 
led  up  to  the  enactment  of  the  Missouri  Com 
promise;  just  what  that  compromise  was, 
and  how  it  affected  the  question  of  slavery; 
the  history  of  the  events  and  causes  which 
led  to  the  passage  of  the  compromise  of 
1 850 ;  its  constitutional  elements ;  just  what 
the  South  got  and  just  what  the  North  got 
by  it,  and  how  it  was  affected  by  the  repeal 
of  the  other  compromise  bill.  It  seems  to 
me  I  could  almost  repeat  those  statements 
to-day,  after  a  half  century,  so  vivid  was  the 
impression. 

I  heard  his  speech  in  the  Major  Hall 
Convention  in  May,  1856,  spoken  of  some 
times  as  the  "Lost  Speech."  But  this 
speech  did  not  impress  me  as  the  one  of 
two  years  before — possibly  because  it  was 

51 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

only  one  of  several  great  speeches  by  other 
great  orators  —  Owen  Lovejoy,  O.  H. 
Browning,  John  M.  Palmer,  Archibald 
Williams,  T.  Lyle  Dickey,  Norton,  Grid- 
ley,  Farnsworth  and  others,  who  all  took  an 
active  part  in  that  historic  convention. 

In  1854,  Judge  Stephen  A.  Douglas 
came  to  Bloomington  to  make  a  speech  de 
fending  the  principles  of  the  Kansas  and 
Nebraska  bill.  Judge  Lawrence  Weldon, 
who  was  then  a  young  lawyer  at  Clinton, 
and  who  had  come  up  to  hear  the  speech, 
went  with  Mr.  Stevenson  and  myself  to  call 
upon  and  pay  our  respects  to  the  "Little 
Giant."  We  were  presented  to  Judge 
Douglas  by  Mr.  Amzi  McWilliams,  then 
a  prominent  Democratic  lawyer  of  this  city. 
After  we  had  been  in  Mr.  Douglas*  room 
a  few  minutes,  Mr.  Lincoln  came  in,  and 
the  Senator  and  he  greeted  each  other 

52 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

most  cordially  as  old  friends,  and  then 
Mr.  Douglas  introduced  Mr.  Lincoln  to 
Judge  Weldon.  He  said:  "Mr.  Lincoln, 
I  want  to  introduce  you  to  Mr.  Wel 
don,  a  young  lawyer  who  has  come  to 
Illinois  from  Ohio,  and  has  located  at  Clin 
ton."  Mr.  Lincoln  said:  "Well,  I  am  glad 
of  that;  I  go  to  Clinton  sometimes  my 
self,  and  we  will  get  acquainted.'*  This 
was  the  beginning  of  an  acquaintance  which 
ripened  into  a  strong  friendship  and  which, 
founded  on  mutual  admiration  and  respect, 
grew  and  strengthened  as  the  years  passed, 
and  ended  only  in  death.  They  met  again 
at  Clinton;  a  sort  of  local  partnership  was 
formed;  they  tried  law  suits  and  rode  the 
circuit  together.  Judge  Weldon  was  the 
active  promoter  of  Mr.  Lincoln's  political 
interests,  and  was  an  elector  in  the  campaign 
of  1860.  I  doubt  if  any  man  living  knew 

53 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Mr.  Lincoln  better,  or  had  in  a  greater  de 
gree  his  confidence,  than  our  distinguished 
friend  and  citizen,  Judge  Lawrence  Weldon. 
In  view  of  the  recent  controversy  as  to 
Mr.  Lincoln's  temperance  principles,  as  to 
whether  he  was  a  "wine-bibber"  or  the 
"president  of  a  temperance  society,"  the  fol 
lowing  may  be  of  interest:  At  this  same 
meeting  I  heard  Mr.  Lincoln  define  his  posi 
tion  on  the  liquor  question.  This  is  authen 
tic,  as  coming  from  Mr.  Lincoln  himself, 
and  ought  to  settle  this  question  forever. 
But  it  won't.  The  controversy  will  go  on, 
like  the  brook,  "forever,"  until  each  side 
convinces  itself.  This  meeting  I  am  speak 
ing  of,  being  a  Democratic  meeting,  the  com 
mittee  had  placed  on  the  sideboard  of  Judge 
Douglas'  room  (probably  without  his  knowl 
edge)  a  pitcher  of  water,  some  glasses  and 
a  decanter  of  red  liquor.  As  visitors  called 

54 


WHO         KNEW        HIM 

they  were  invited  to  partake;  most  of  the 
Democrats  declined.  When  Mr.  Lincoln 
rose  to  go,  Mr.  Douglas  said,  "Mr.  Lin 
coln,  won't  you  take  something?"  Mr.  Lin 
coln  said,  "No,  I  think  not."  Mr.  Douglas 
said,  "What!  are  you  a  member  of  the 
Temperance  Society?"  "No,"  said  Mr. 
Lincoln,  "I  am  not  a  member  of  any  tem 
perance  society;  but  I  am  temperate,  in  //»'s, 
that  I  don't  drink  anything." 

At  the  same  meeting,  another  incident  oc 
curred  which  I  wish  to  relate.  One  of  the 
visitors  who  came  to  call  on  Senator  Doug 
las  v/as  the  Hon.  Jesse  W.  Fell.  He  was 
an  old  friend,  and  had  known  Douglas  when 
he  first  came  to  the  State.  I  remember  very 
well  their  cordial  meeting  and  recall  clearly 
a  part  of  their  conversation.  After  talking 
a  while  of  old  times  and  mutual  friends,  Mr. 
Fell  said,  "Judge  Douglas,  many  of  Mr. 

55 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Lincoln's  friends  would  be  greatly  pleased 
to  hear  a  joint  discussion  between  you  and 
him  on  these  new  and  important  questions 
now  interesting  the  people,  and  I  will  be 
glad  if  such  a  discussion  can  be  arranged." 
Mr.  Douglas  seemed  annoyed,  and,  after 
hesitating  a  moment,  said:  "No;  I  won't 
do  it!  I  come  to  Chicago,  and  there  I  am 
met  by  an  old  line  abolitionist ;  I  come  down 
to  the  center  of  the  State,  and  I  am  met  by 
an  old  line  Whig;  I  go  to  the  south  end  of 
the  State,  and  I  am  met  by  an  anti-adminis 
tration  Democrat.  I  can't  hold  the  aboli 
tionist  responsible  for  what  the  Whig  says; 
I  can't  hold  the  Whig  responsible  for  what 
the  abolitionist  says,  and  I  can't  hold  either 
responsible  for  what  the  Democrat  says.  It 
looks  like  dogging  a  man  over  the  State. 
This  is  my  meeting;  the  people  have  come 
to  hear  me,  and  I  want  to  talk  to  them." 

56 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

Mr.  Fell  said:  "Well,  Judge,  you  may  be 
right;  perhaps  some  other  time  it  can  be 
arranged." 

I  have  told  this  incident  for  a  purpose. 
Mr.  Fell  never  gave  up  this  idea  of  a  joint 
discussion.  He  was  the  first  man  to  sug 
gest  it.  From  1 854  to  1 858  he  continued  to 
urge  it,  and  to  Mr.  Jesse  W.  Fell,  more  than 
to  any  other  man,  is  due  the  credit  of  bring 
ing  about  those  great  debates,  the  full  influ 
ence  of  which,  upon  Mr.  Lincoln's  fortunes, 
the  events  of  history  and  the  fate  of  the 
nation,  no  man  is  wise  enough  to  know.  Mr. 
Fell  was  the  intimate,  devoted,  and  wise 
friend  of  Mr.  Lincoln.  I  speak  with  some 
knowledge  and  with  perfect  sincerity  when 
I  say  that,  with  the  possible  exception  of  the 
Hon.  David  Davis,  Mr.  Fell  did  more  than 
any  other  man,  living  or  dead,  to  secure  the 
nomination  of  Mr.  Lincoln  to  the  presidency. 

57 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Mr.  Fell  was  one  of  our  citizens.  He 
was  Bloomington's  first  lawyer.  His  life 
was  a  benefaction  to  this  community.  I  am 
pleased  to  take  advantage  of  this  opportu 
nity  to  connect  his  name  with  the  name  of 
the  man  he  helped,  and  to  pay  a  modest 
tribute  to  one  of  the  best  men  that  ever  lived. 

In  the  fall  of  1860,  I  met  Mr.  Lincoln 
on  the  sidewalk  in  front  of  the  old  court 
house.  He  had  come  from  Springfield  to 
arrange  some  old  suits,  in  view  of  his  de 
parture  for  Washington.  He  shook  hands 
with  me,  and  said:  "Well,  you  have  gotten 
to  be  a  lawyer.  Let  me  give  you  some  ad 
vice:  Don't  meddle  with  politics;  stick  to 
the  law."  I  replied:  "Mr.  President,  I 
fear  your  example  may  prove  more  alluring 
than  your  advice."  No!  no!"  said  he; 
"that  was  an  accident."  He  passed  into 
the  court  house,  and  that  was  the  last  time 

I  ever  saw  him. 

58 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

Personal  reminiscences  must  be  confined 
to  a  time  prior  to  1860.  The  four  years 
following  belong  to  the  history  of  the  world. 

This  is  the  time  of  the  making  of  many 
books,  the  writing  of  many  histories,  biog 
raphies,  short  and  long  sketches  in  maga 
zines  and  newspapers,  critiques  and  tributes, 
memoirs,  stories,  anecdotes  and  lies  about 
Mr.  Lincoln.  There  are  books  by  His  Pri 
vate  Secretary,  by  the  "Man  Who  Knew 
Lincoln,"  by  lots  of  men  and  women  who 
didn't  know  him,  by  a  member  of  the  New 
York  Bar,  by  members  of  other  bars,  by 
editors,  schoolmasters  and  preachers,  by 
"butlers,  bakers  and  candlestick-makers,"  by 
"old  neighbors"  and  by  "old  clients" — all 
about  "Lincoln  as  a  Boy,"  "Lincoln  the 
Man,"  "Lincoln  the  Soldier,"  "Lincoln  the 
Lawyer,"  "Lincoln  the  Story-Teller,"  "Lin 
coln  the  Lover,"  "Lincoln  the  Dreamer," 

59 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

"Lincoln  the  Farmer,"  the  "Wood  Chop 
per"  and  the  "Foot  Racer."  There  will  be 
delivered  this  12th  day  of  February,  1909, 
more  than  fifty  thousand  speeches,  addresses, 
orations  and  memorials  which  will  help  to 
swell  this  Lincolnian  literary  melange  to  the 
proportions  of  an  Alexandrian  library. 

It  would  be  strange  indeed,  in  view  of  the 
many  authors,  the  variety  of  publications  and 
the  character  of  the  subject,  if  there  should 
not  be  found  an  immense  amount  of  mis 
representation,  false  history,  inaccurate  esti 
mates,  false  narrative,  tiresome  repetitions, 
sentimental  bathos,  and  silly  white  lies.  Old 
Doctor  Johnson,  when  Boswell  told  him  he 
"intended  to  write  his  life,"  said,  "If  I  be 
lieved  you,  I  would  take  yours."  If  Mr. 
Lincoln  had  been  told  what  some  of  his 
friends  intended  to  do,  he  would  have  said 
with  David,  "Oh,  that  mine  enemy  would 
write  a  book!" 

60 


WHO        KNEW        HIM 

The  trouble  is  that  men  who  never  saw 
Mr.  Lincoln,  and  who  have  no  adequate 
conception  of  his  life  and  character,  have 
gotten  up  old  stories,  incidents,  traditions, 
second-hand  anecdotes,  and  rushed  into  print 
to  make  history.  Others  even  manufacture 
goody-goody  lies  to  increase  his  reputation. 
Others  write  of  him  as  a  slouch,  a  buffoon, 
an  uneducated  gawk,  to  increase  the  wonder 
of  his  career.  Others  tell  of  artful  prac 
tices  and  doubtful  tricks,  to  demonstrate  his 
shrewdness.  Others  recite  sentimental  and 
impossible  rescues  and  charities,  which  put 
old  Santa  Claus  to  shame.  One  old  citizen 
tells  of  a  wonderful  conversation  he  had  with 
Mr.  Lincoln  at  the  time  of  the  Douglas  and 
Lincoln  debate  at  Bloomington — a  debate 
which  never  took  place.  A  reverend  gentle 
man  tells  how  an  actor  friend  of  his  was  in 
vited  by  Mr.  Lincoln  to  "stay  all  night'* 

61 


L   I   N   C   O   LN     —      By      MEN 

with  him  at  the  White  House  during  the 
war;  how  they  talked  till  midnight,  and 
how  Mr.  Lincoln  told  him  all  the  secrets  of 
the  war;  how,  when  they  had  retired,  the 
actor  heard  some  one  apparently  in  great 
distress ;  how  he  got  up  and  wandered  about 
the  halls  until  he  found  Mr.  Lincoln's  pri 
vate  bedroom,  and,  looking  through  the  key 
hole,  saw  Mr.  Lincoln  on  his  knees,  agoniz 
ing  in  prayer,  etc.  I  suppose  this  preacher 
believed  that  proving  Mr.  Lincoln  a  saint 
justified  him  in  proving  his  friend  a  liar  and 
a  sneak. 

Another  one  of  these  stories  is  how  Mr. 
Lincoln  manufactured  an  almanac  and  intro 
duced  it  in  evidence  to  confound  a  witness 
who  had  sworn  a  certain  night  was  moon 
light,  when  the  manufactured  almanac 
showed  it  was  the  dark  of  the  moon, 
thus  saving  his  client's  life.  This  story  is 

62 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

repeated  in  Mr.  Churchill's  book,  "The 
Crisis,"  and  even  in  school  books.  No  one 
who  knew  Mr.  Lincoln  can  think  of  him  as 
deliberately  perpetrating  a  forgery  upon  the 
court,  and  practicing  a  trick  of  which  only 
a  pettifogger  could  conceive — a  silly  trick, 
too,  which  would  certainly  have  been  in 
stantly  exposed. 

Another  friend  of  Mr.  Lincoln  tells  how 
he  accompanied  him  to  Washington  from 
Springfield  in  1 860,  and  how  the  President 
"kept  the  entire  company  in  constant  roars  of 
laughter"  by  telling  questionable  stories  and 
jokes.  It  is  probable  this  fellow  was  not 
on  the  train  at  all.  I  think  there  have  been 
more  lies  told  about  Mr.  Lincoln  than  about 
Santa  Claus.  A  curious  thing  is  that  they 
are  not  usually  malicious,  but  mostly  told  by 
mistaken  friends  and  for  good  purposes. 
They  are  white  lies,  but  I  fear,  unlike  that 

63 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

of  Uncle  Toby  and  the  loving  lie  of  Desde- 
mona,  they  will  never  be  blotted  out  by  the 
tears  of  the  recording  angel. 

You  and  I  can  do  little  to  stem  this  lit 
erary  flood,  but  we  can  thank  God  that  the 
subject  of  it  is  safe  in  the  Pantheon,  beyond 
the  domain  of  human  praise,  blame  or — 
stupidity. 

Mr.  Lincoln  dressed  as  well  as  the  aver 
age  Western  lawyer  of  his  day.  I  do  not 
think  he  gave  much  time  to  the  tying  of  his 
necktie,  and  he  could  not  have  been  said  by 
his  best  friends  to  be  much  of  a  dude,  but 
he  was  always  respectably  clothed.  Mr. 
Lincoln  was  not  a  story-teller  in  the  sense 
of  "swapping  stories,"  or  telling  a  story  for 
the  sake  of  the  story  itself.  He  was  pos 
sessed  of  great  humor,  and  a  wonderfully 
acute  sense  of  the  ridiculous.  He  had  that 
marvelous  "gift  of  the  gods"  which  we  some- 

64 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

times  call  the  "sixth  sense."  Unexpected 
situations,  curious  expressions,  odd  sayings, 
unusual  appearances  and  humorous  actions 
made  an  impression  on  him.  He  remem 
bered  these  and  often  used  them  as  illustra 
tions.  /He  seldom,  if  ever,  told  a  story  ex 
cept  to  illustrate  a  point  in  his  speech  or  argu 
ment,  and  in  this  kind  of  illustration  no  man 
was  more  apt.  A  few  minutes  after  the 
voting  in  the  legislature,  in  1858,  when  Mr. 
Douglas  was  elected  Senator,  Mr.  Lincoln 
was  asked  by  a  friend,  "How  do  you  feel?" 
Said  he,  "I  feel  like  the  boy  who  stumped 
his  toe:  I  am  too  big  to  cry  and  too  badly 
hurt  to  laugh." 

Hon.  Ezra  M.  Prince,  a  Bloomington 
lawyer,  who  knew  Lincoln  very  well,  told 
the  following  story :  After  the  adjournment 
of  the  Major  Hall  convention,  the  Repub 
lican  editors  of  Illinois  met  in  convention  at 

65 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Bloomington.  Mr.  Lincoln  attended  and 
was  invited  to  address  the  meeting.  He  said 
he  was  afraid  he  was  out  of  his  place.  He 
was  not  an  editor,  and  had  no  business  there ; 
in  fact,  he  was  an  interloper.  He  said:  "I 
feel  like  I  once  did  when  I  met  a  woman 
riding  horseback  in  the  woods.  As  I 
stopped  to  let  her  pass,  she  also  stopped,  and, 
looking  at  me  intently,  said,  'I  do  believe 
you  are  the  ugliest  man  I  ever  saw.'  Said  I, 
'Madam,  you  probably  are  right,  but  I 
can't  help  it!'  'No,'  said  she,  *y°u  can't 
help  it,  but  you  might  stay  at  home!'  ' 

Hon.  John  B.  Henderson,  who  was  a 
Senator  from  Missouri  during  the  war,  told 
the  following  story,  as  showing  how  Mr. 
Lincoln  could  illustrate  a  situation  by  an  in 
cident:  He  said  he  was  at  the  White 
House,  talking  with  Mr.  Lincoln.  It  was 
at  a  time  when  great  pressure  was  being 

66 


WHO        K     N    E     W         HIM 

brought  upon  the  President  by  certain  rad 
ical  members  to  induce  him  to  issue  an  Eman 
cipation  Proclamation.  Mr.  Lincoln  had 
been  telling  Mr.  Henderson  about  his 
troubles  in  that  regard.  He  did  not  think 
the  time  was  ripe,  and  was  very  much  an 
noyed  at  the  persistence  of  three  men  whom 
he  named  —  Senators  Wade  and  Sumner, 
and  Thaddeus  Stevens,  of  Pennsylvania.  All 
at  once  Mr.  Lincoln  said,  "Henderson,  did 
you  ever  attend  an  old  field  school?" 
"Yes,"  said  the  Senator.  "Well,"  said  Mr. 
Lincoln,  "I  did,  and  a  funny  thing  occurred 
one  day.  You  know,  we  had  no  reading 
books,  and  we  read  out  of  the  Bible.  The 
class  would  stand  up  in  a  row,  the  teacher 
in  front  of  them,  and  read  verses,  turn  about. 
This  day  we  were  reading  about  the  He 
brew  children.  As  none  of  us  were  very 
good  readers,  we  were  in  the  habit  of  count- 

67 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

ing  ahead  and  each  one  practicing  on  his 
particular  verse.  Standing  next  to  me  was 
a  red-headed,  freckled-faced  boy,  who  was 
the  poorest  reader  in  the  class.  It  so  fell 
out  that  the  names  of  the  Hebrew  children 
appeared  in  his  verse.  He  managed  to 
work  through  Shadrach,  fell  down  at  Me- 
shach,  and  went  all  to  pieces  at  Abednego. 
The  reading  went  on,  and  in  due  course  of 
time  came  round  again,  but  when  the  turn 
came  near  enough  for  the  boy  to  see  his 
verse,  he  pointed  to  it  in  great  consternation, 
and  whispered  to  me,  'Look!  there  come 

them    three    d d    fellers    again.*     And 

there,"  said  Mr.  Lincoln,  pointing  out  of 
the  window,  "come  those  three  same  fel 
lows."  And  sure  enough,  there  were  Wade, 
Stevens  and  Sumner,  coming  up  the  walk. 
Mr.  Henderson  added :  "As  I  arose  to  take 
my  departure,  the  other  gentlemen  entered, 

68 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

and  there  was  a  smile  on  Mr.  Lincoln's  face, 
as  if  his  thoughts  had  flown  away  over  all 
the  years,  from  war  and  trouble,  to  the  old 
field  school  in  the  forest  of  Indiana." 

No  one  called  Mr.  Lincoln  "Abe."  Judge 
Davis,  General  Gridley,  Mr.  Isaac  Funk, 
Mr.  Fell,  Leonard  Swett,  General  William 
Ward  Orme,  Lawrence  Weldon,  William 
McCullough,  Judge  Treat,  John  T.  Stuart, 
Owen  T.  Reeves,  Reuben  M.  Benjamin, 
and  William  H.  Hanna — all  of  them  Lin 
coln's  early  friends  and  associates,  and  all 
of  them  elegant  and  dignified  gentlemen— 
invariably  addressed  him  as  "Mr.  Lincoln." 
It  was  always  Mr.  Clay,  Mr.  Webster,  Mr. 
Lincoln. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  think  of  Mr.  Lincoln  as 
an  ordinary  man,  even  from  the  first.  In 
1844  he  was  a  lawyer  of  state  reputation; 
nine  years  before  he  was  in  the  legislature, 

69 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

where  he  met  such  men  as  Douglas,  McCler- 
nand,  Browning,  Ebenezer  Peck,  Robert 
Blackwell,  Joseph  Gillespie  and  Judge  Pur 
ple.  These  were  great  men,  and  he  was 
never  dwarfed  in  their  presence.  I  have 
spoken  of  the  men  with  whom  he  associated 
and  acted  in  our  city.  He  was  always  easily 
the  leader;  he  was  the  talker;  everybody 
deferred  to  Mr.  Lincoln;  he  had  the  center 
of  the  stage  by  common  consent.  He  knew 
more  of  the  matter  in  hand.  He  thought 
more;  he  was  a  better  talker,  and  was  a 
natural  leader. 

When  elected  to  the  presidency,  Lincoln 
did  not  select  for  his  adviser,  his  private  sec 
retary  and  other  unknown  men,  but  William 
H.  Seward,  Edward  Bates,  Salmon  P. 
Chase — all  of  whom  had  been  prominent 
candidates  in  the  Republican  party  for  the 
presidential  nomination,  and  to  these  were 

70 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

added  other  distinguished  and  leading  men 
who  constituted  his  Cabinet.  He  did  not 
fear  he  would  be  overshadowed,  and  he 
never  was.  From  the  first  he  was  the  equal 
of  any  of  them,  and  in  Washington,  as  in 
Bloomington,  he  was  the  "Leader  of  Men." 
It  is  a  mistake  to  think  of  Mr.  Lincoln  as 
an  uneducated  man.  The  "kindergarten" 
and  "primary"  courses  were  taken  in  a  Ken 
tucky  cabin,  with  his  mother  as  "principal." 
Possibly  he  never  learned  at  his  school  to 
make  maps,  but  he  did  learn  "manners  and 
morals."  At  the  age  of  nine  he  entered 
the  academy  to  prepare  for  college.  This 
"school  of  learning"  was  located  in  a  "clear 
ing"  on  his  father's  farm,  a  "little  house  in 
the  woods"  in  the  State  of  Indiana.  Here 
his  attention  was  first  directed  to  "physical 
culture."  This  study  he  was  not  permitted 
to  neglect.  The  "gymnasium"  was  well  fur- 

71 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

nished  with  "apparatus"  —  axes,  wedges, 
mauls,  log-chains,  cross-bars,  swinging  sap 
lings,  etc.  Then  came  "nature  study  out 
on  the  campus."  He  found  spring  beauties 
and  sweet  williams,  May-apples  and  purple 
grapes,  and,  out  beyond,  the  prairie  grasses 
and  the  wild  rose.  From  these,  from  tree, 
shrub  and  plant,  from  form,  color  and  per 
fume,  came  that  sense  of  beauty  embodied 
in  those  exquisite  prose  poems  which  we  so 
much  love  to  read.  This  branch  of  study 
included  zoology.  He  learned  the  names 
of  animals,  their  nature,  habits,  instincts,  his 
tory  and  language.  He  knew  when  the 
birds  mated  and  how  they  built  their  homes, 
and  he  learned  well  the  lesson  best  worth 
learning  from  this  science — to  be  kind  and 
gentle  to  all  animal  nature. 

He  had  lessons  in  political  economy — the 
value  of  money;    supply  and  demand;    the 

72 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

virtue  of  economy;  the  proper  sources  of 
wealth;  the  lessons  of  necessity,  and  the 
value  of  labor.  He  closed  his  academic 
course  at  the  age  of  twenty-one,  with  the 
honors  of  his  class,  and  entered  the  univer 
sity.  He  studied  mathematics,  became  a 
surveyor  and  naval  architect.  He  became 
a  great  linguist,  and  his  success  was  all  the 
greater  in  that  he  confined  himself  to  one 
language.  He  devoted  himself  so  diligently 
to  the  study  of  history  that  he  learned  how 
to  make  history. 

He  read  and  re-read  Shakespeare,  Burns 
and  Byron.  He  studied  some  of  the  best 
English  classics,  and  that  wonderful  volume 
of  Hebrew  literature,  the  Bible.  The  result 
of  these  "language  studies"  is  the  purest 
English  ever  written. 

Rhetoric  and  logic  came  easy.  He  was 
a  philosopher  by  nature.  "Civil  govern- 

73 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

ment"  he  learned  under  Jefferson,  Madison 
and  Hamilton.  He  took  a  post-graduate 
course  in  law  under  Professors  Blackstone 
and  Chitty,  and  from  this  department,  as 
from  the  university  and  the  academy,  he  car 
ried  away  all  honors,  and  was  the  valedic 
torian  of  his  class.  And  yet  there  are  pseudo 
historians  and  pretentious  litterati  who  speak 
of  Lincoln  as  illiterate  and  uneducated.  I 
say,  he  was  the  best  educated  man  in  his 
day,  if  the  best  education  means  the  best 
equipment  for  the  duties  of  life. 

There  are  a  great  many  good  Americans 
who  are  not  exactly  satisfied  with  Mr.  Lin 
coln's  ancestry.  They  can  stand  his  pov 
erty  all  right — that  could  be  remedied — but 
a  great  man  ought  to  have  not  only  a  father 
and  a  mother,  but  several  grandfathers.  In 
that  marvelous  transition  from  poverty  to 
affluence,  from  a  cabin  to  the  White  House, 

74 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

from  obscurity  to  fame,  the  aching  void  is 
the  want  of  ancestry.  Mr.  Lincoln,  in  his 
biography,  gives  the  following  account  of  his 
family : 

"I  was  born  February  12,  1809,  in  Har- 
din  county,  Kentucky.  My  parents  were 
both  from  Virginia,  of  undistinguished  fami 
lies — second  families,  perhaps  I  should  say. 
My  mother,  who  died  in  my  tenth  year,  was 
of  a  family  of  the  name  of  Hanks,  some  of 
whom  now  reside  in  Adams  county,  and 
others  in  Macon  county,  Illinois.  My  pater 
nal  grandfather,  Abraham  Lincoln,  emi 
grated  from  Rockington  county,  Virginia,  to 
Kentucky,  about  1781  or  1782,  where,  a 
year  or  two  later,  he  was  killed  by  Indians, 
not  in  battle,  but  by  stealth,  when  he  was 
laboring  to  open  a  farm  in  the  forest.  His 
ancestors,  who  were  Quakers,  went  to  Vir 
ginia  from  Berks  county,  Pennsylvania.  An 

75 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

effort  to  identify  them  with  the  New  Eng 
land  family  of  the  same  name  ended  in 
nothing  more  definite  than  a  similarity  of 
Christian  names  in  both  families." 

But  this  modest  account,  splendid  in  its 
simplicity,  is  by  no  means  satisfying  to  the 
inquirer  after  a  nobler  lineage.  Since  we 
have  known  anything  of  the  history  of  the 
human  race,  there  has  been  traceable  a  dis 
position  to  make  of  the  hero  a  demigod. 
Achilles,  the  son  of  Pelius,  was  also  the 
son  of  Thetis.  Alexander,  after  he  had 
conquered  the  world,  was  the  son  of  Her 
cules.  Julius  Caesar  became  a  descendant 
of  Aeneas,  who  had  a  goddess  for  his 
mother.  Moses  no  longer  has  a  Hebrew 
mother,  but  is  the  son  of  the  Pharaohs.  This 
is  only  the  symbolism  of  that  disposition  of 
human  nature  to  account  for  great  men  and 
great  achievements  by  greatness  of  birth. 

76 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

But  there  is  hope!  I  bring  you  good 
news!  Mr.  Lincoln's  ancestors  have  been 
discovered!  Two  "distinguished  genealo 
gists,"  one  an  American  and  one  an  Eng 
lishman,  have  for  years  been  collaborating  to 
trace  the  ancestry  of  the  great  President  to 
his  English  forebears,  through  colleges  of 
heraldry  and  the  records  of  the  courts  of 
chancery,  for  many  generations.  They 
have  made  many  wonderful  discoveries. 
The  result  of  these  genealogical  labors  is 
a  book  (I  quote  from  the  publishers) 
"which  is  a  fine  example  of  sound  genealog 
ical  research,  and  is  now  offered  at  this 
centenary  of  Lincoln's  birth,"  to  a  waiting 
public;  "with  elaborate  tables,  copious  ap 
pendices,  richly  illustrated,  and  including  "a 
defense  of  Thomas  Lincoln,  in  one  octavo 
volume,  at  ten  dollars  net"!  Mr.  Lincoln 
had  written  it  all  in  twelve  lines.  These 

77 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

"distinguished  genealogists  require  a  quarto 
volume."  Which  do  you  like  the  better? 
Seriously,  is  it  not  strange,  and  is  it  not  de 
plorable,  that  an  intelligent  American  could 
believe  that  Saxon  or  Norman  lineage  could 
add  anything  to  the  fame  of  a  man  whose 
presence  already  fills  the  world?  If  his 
birth  was  lowly,  his  deeds  are  royal  in  that 
land  which  men  call  fame. 

We  are  all  hero-worshipers,  and  often, 
when  our  heroes  are  above  the  clouds,  we 
build  unto  ourselves  graven  images.  Some 
times  their  crowns  are  only  tinsel,  and 
are  easily  tarnished;  sometimes  their  halos 
are  only  of  paper  and  are  very  fragile.  Men 
will  differ  as  to  the  chief  foundation  of  Mr. 
Lincoln's  fame,  but  there  will  be  no  differ 
ence  as  to  its  being  real  and  lasting.  Some 
day,  the  true  historian  will  appear.  Some 
day,  out  of  all  this  rubbish  and  jumble  of 

78 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

inconsistencies,  the  true  history  will  be  writ 
ten.  Some  day,  when  the  rugged  propor 
tions  of  this  great  historic  figure,  by  time 
and  distance  have  been  rounded  into  form, 
the  real  man  will  be  known.  Then,  I  think, 
we  will  come  to  realize  that,  in  the  history 
of  a  great  man,  chance  is  not  so  much  a 
factor  as  Providence.  Then  we  will  under 
stand  better  and  appreciate  more,  how  price 
less  was  our  heritage,  and  that,  although 
given  to  the  ages,  "it  was  not  taken  from  us." 


79 


Address  of 
Richard  Price  Morgan 


RICHARD  PRICE  MORGAN 


COL.  RICHARD  PRICE  MORGAN 

Richard  Price  Morgan  was  born  at  Stockbridge, 
Massachusetts,  on  September  17,  1828,  and  died 
at  Dwight,  Illinois,  May  20,  1910,  which  was  after 
the  address  published  in  this  book  was  delivered. 
In  1852,  he  came  to  Illinois  in  charge  of  the  location 
and  construction  of  what  is  now  the  Chicago  & 
Alton  Railroad,  with  his  head-quarters  at  Bloom- 
ington.  Upon  the  completion  of  that  road  he 
became  its  general  superintendent,  in  which  capac 
ity  he  served  until  1857.  He  founded  the  city 
of  Dwight,  Illinois,  and  lived  there  with  some 
interruptions  until  his  death.  In  his  later  life 
he  was  connected  with  many  very  important 
engineering  projects,  and  became  a  great  authority 
in  all  engineering  matters,  serving  at  one  time  as 
chief  engineer  of  the  United  States  Pacific  Railway 
Commission.  In  1896  he  was  appointed  by  Pres 
ident  Cleveland  a  member  of  the  board  of  engineers 
to  select  a  location  and  prepare  plans  and  estimates 
for  a  deep  water  harbor  on  the  southern  coast  of 
California.  Later  in  life,  the  degree  of  Doctor 

83 


of  Engineering  was   conferred  upon  him  by   the 
University  of  Illinois. 

In  1860,  when  King  Edward,  then  the  Prince 
of  Wales,  visited  the  United  States,  Mr.  Morgan 
entertained  him,  at  Dwight,  during  his  stay  in 
that  town  on  a  hunt.  Mr.  Morgan  was  a  large 
minded  and  public  spirited  man,  and  in  his  death, 
the  State  lost  a  most  useful  citizen.  Of  faultless 
dress  and  lofty  and  dignified  bearing,  "Col.  Morgan" 
as  he  was  called,  was  a  typical  gentleman  of  the 
old  school. 


84 


Address  of 
Richard  Price  Morgan 

at  Pontiac,  Illinois,  February   12,  19O9, 
on  "Lincoln  at  the  Decatur  Convention" 


Mr.  President  and  Fellow  Citizens  of  Liv 
ingston  County: 

We  have  assembled  to  celebrate  the  com 
ing  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  the  mightiest  hu 
man  power  and  inspiration  for  good  ever 
given  to  mankind.  This  is  an  auspicious 
day  for  this  country  and  for  the  oppressed 
of  all  nations.  It  is  being  most  earnestly 
celebrated  throughout  the  world  wherever 
Christianity  has  lifted  up  the  people.  In 
joining  with  you  to  celebrate  this  great 
period  in  the  march  of  time,  and  in  the  his 
tory  of  our  country,  it  is  my  duty  to  you 
as  chairman  of  your  delegation  to  the  Re- 

85 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

publican  State  Convention  at  Decatur,  Illi 
nois,  on  the  ninth  and  tenth  of  May,  1860, 
to  give  an  accurate  account  to  you  of  my 
stewardship. 

Your  delegation  was  selected  at  a  county 
convention  held  in  the  old  courthouse  in 
Pontiac,  early  in  May.  The  personnel  of 
the  delegation  was:  The  late  Hon.  Jason 
W.  Strevell,  William  Gagan,  A.  J.  Crop- 
sey,  deceased,  and  Richard  Price  Morgan. 
It  is  fitting  for  me  to  say  in  this  connection 
that  Mr.  Strevell,  of  Pontiac,  was  the  first 
delegate  chosen  in  the  County  Convention, 
and  by  priority  and  also  by  his  fine  abilities 
he  naturally  became  chairman;  but,  on 
account  of  my  acquaintance  with  and  friend 
ship  for  Mr.  Lincoln,  Mr.  Strevell  urged 
and,  by  his  own  motion,  caused  me  to  act 
as  chairman  of  the  delegation.  I  may 
appropriately  add  that  your  delegation 

86 


WHO         KNEW        HIM 

worked  in  the  convention  in  perfect  harmony 
with  the  twelve  delegates  from  McLean 
County,  all  of  whom  have  passed  away. 
Their  enthusiasm  for  Lincoln  was  un 
bounded,  and  they  claimed  that  the  flint 
was  first  struck  by  Lincoln  at  Bloomington, 
that  started  the  patriotic  fires  which  lighted 
his  way  for  the  presidency. 

My  personal  acquaintance  with  and 
friendship  for  Mr.  Lincoln  began  in  1853, 
and  continued  until  his  death  in  1 865.  The 
instructions  we  received  when  we  were 
appointed  delegates  were  to  vote  as  a  unit 
for  State  officers,  and  especially  we  were 
charged  to  do  all  in  our  power  to  secure 
the  passage  of  a  resolution  pledging  the 
State  of  Illinois  to  the  National  Conven 
tion,  about  to  assemble  in  Chicago,  its  pa 
triotism  and  integrity,  as  represented  in  the 
person  of  Abraham  Lincoln,  to  secure  his 

nomination  for  the  presidency. 

87 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Mr.  Lincoln  was  personally  present  at  the 
convention,  and  your  delegates,  as  all  others, 
had  ample  opportunity  to  meet  and  freely 
converse  with  him,  upon  the  topics  of  the 
day.  I  shall  not  attempt  to  describe  the 
intense  patriotism  which  animated  that  most 
notable  assembly.  But  to  give  you  some 
idea  of  its  spirit,  I  will  repeat  a  short  sen 
tence  from  the  speech  of  our  War  governor, 
Richard  Yates,  in  acknowledging  his  nomi 
nation.  He  said:  "Let  us  hope  that  the 
South  will  not  attempt  to  destroy  this  Union ; 
but,  if  it  should,  flaming  giants  will  spring 
from  every  cornfield  in  the  State  of  Illinois." 

After  the  State  business  was  concluded, 
the  following  resolution  was  unanimously 
adopted  with  unbounded  enthusiasm.  Re 
solved:  "That  Abraham  Lincoln  is  the 
choice  of  the  Republican  party  in  Illinois  for 
the  presidency,  and  that  the  delegates  from 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

this  State  are  instructed  to  use  all  honor 
able  means  to  procure  his  nomination  by  the 
Chicago  Convention,  and  that  their  vote  be 
cast  as  a  unit  for  him." 

Mr.  Lincoln  was  then  escorted  into  the 
wigwam  and  to  the  platform  by  a  commit 
tee  selected  by  the  chair.  His  appearance 
before  the  convention  was  the  signal  for 
another  outburst  of  most  hearty  welcome. 
He  received  it  without  a  smile,  but  the  be 
nignant  expression  of  his  eyes  and  face,  and 
also  his  whole  attitude,  disclosed  to  every 
man  in  that  multitude  the  affectionate  grati 
tude  of  his  heart. 

The  response  of  Mr.  Lincoln  to  the  reso 
lution  was  in  a  few  grateful  words  of  thanks. 
At  the  close  of  his  remarks,  Livingston 
County  first  led  off  and  gave  the  word — 
Three  times  Three  for  Abraham  Lincoln, 
our  next  President.  After  these,  nine  cheers 

89 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

were  given  with  a  will,  the  word  came  again 
from  another  part  of  the  convention — Three 
times  Three  for  Honest  Old  Abe,  our  next 
President.  This  was  followed  by  another 
and  another. 

When  quiet  was  partially  restored,  Mr. 
Lincoln  came  slowly  down  from  the  plat 
form,  shaking  the  hundreds  of  hands  which 
were  extended  to  him.  At  this  juncture  the 
rail  committee,  headed  by  Mr.  Hanks, 
pressed  through  the  crowd  with  several  rails, 
carried  them  to  the  platform,  and  standing 
them  up  stood  by  them.  Without  further 
word  the  crowd,  into  which  Lincoln  had 
pressed  his  way  some  distance,  commenced 
to  shout  "Identify  your  work."  He  was 
at  once  seized  upon  and  carried  in  the  arms 
and  over  the  heads  of  the  crowd  to  the 
platform  again  and  placed  beside  the  rails. 
Then  the  Convention,  being  again  seated, 

90 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

shouted,  "Identify  your  work!  Identify  your 
work!"  After  a  moment's  hesitation,  ad 
dressing  himself  to  the  Convention,  he  said, 
quite  solemnly,  "I  cannot  say  that  I  split 
these  rails."  Turning  to  Mr.  Hanks  and 
the  committee,  and  looking  at  the  rails,  Mr. 
Lincoln  asked:  "Where  did  you  get  the 
rails?"  Mr.  Hanks  replied:  "At  the 
farm  you  improved  down  on  the  Sanga- 
mon."  "Well,"  said  Lincoln,  "that  was  a 
long  time  ago.  However,  it  is  possible  I 
may  have  split  these  rails,  but  I  cannot  iden 
tify  them."  Again  the  Convention  shouted, 
"Identify  your  work!  Identify  your  work!" 
At  this  time  the  care  visible  on  Mr.  Lincoln's 
face  gave  way  to  a  pleasant  smile  and  he 
again  said,  "What  kind  of  timber  are  they?" 
The  committee  replied,  "Honey  locust  and 
black  walnut."  "Well,"  said  Lincoln,  his 
smile  increasing,  "that  is  lasting  timber,  and 

91 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

it  may  be  that  I  split  the  rails."  Then  he 
seemed  to  examine  the  rails  critically,  his 
smile  all  the  time  increasing,  until  his  con 
tagious  merriment  was  visible,  and  he  laugh 
ingly  said,  "Well,  boys,  I  can  only  say  I 
have  split  a  great  many  better  looking  ones." 

This  tactful  turn  was  met  by  a  storm  of 
approval,  and  three  times  three  were  then 
given,  and  three  more  for  "Honest  Abraham 
Lincoln,  the  rail  candidate,  our  next  Presi- 
dent." 

The  Convention  then  adjourned  sine  die. 
In  a  moment  there  was  a  rush  of  delegates 
to  the  platform.  The  rails  were  seized  upon 
and  pieces  of  some  of  them  were  sawed  off 
for  souvenirs.  I  am  happy  to  say  that  Liv 
ingston  County  was  again  among  the  first 
to  get  two  pieces,  and  that  I  have  with  me 
as  a  token  of  the  rail  episode  of  that  con 
vention  parts  of  the  pieces  of  rails  brought 

92 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

home  to  Livingston  County,  now  in  the  form 
of  a  gavel. 

Nothing  could  have  afforded  more  de 
cisive  proof  that  Lincoln  did  split  the  rails 
than  his  adroit  presentation  of  the  circum 
stantial  evidence.  This  was  at  once  recog 
nized  by  every  delegate  and  was  received 
with  delightful  satisfaction.  The  signifi 
cance  of  this  rail  episode  in  respect  to  the 
character  of  Mr.  Lincoln  and  his  subsequent 
conduct  of  the  affairs  of  our  country  through 
its  most  dreadful  trial,  will  be  manifest  to 
all  thoughtful  persons.  His  honesty,  sagacity 
and  tact  were  the  foundations  upon  which 
he  stood  immovable,  when  saving  our  coun 
try,  until  the  day  of  his  death. 

I  have  for  this  reason  considered  it  my 
duty  in  this  respect  especially  to  report  to 
you  and  in  the  interest  of  accurate  history 
state  the  facts  which  I  have  for  so  many 

93 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

years  been  possessed  of  in  data  and  in  an 
excellent  memory.  I  feel  so  assured  in  what  I 
have  said  that  I  do  not  believe  it  possible  for 
any  one  to  raise  reasonable  doubt  of  its  gen 
eral  accuracy,  nor  shall  I  recede  from  any 
part  of  it  without  the  indisputable  proof  of 
eye-witnesses  like  myself. 

Soon  after  the  adjournment  of  the  conven 
tion,  your  delegation  called  on  Mr.  Lincoln 
to  give  him  its  best  wishes  and  bid  him  good 
bye  for  Livingston  county.  At  that  inter 
view  he  said,  in  answer  to  a  question  as  to 
his  chances:  "I  reckon  I'll  get  about  a  hun 
dred  votes  at  Chicago,  and  I  have  a  notion 
that  will  be  the  high  mark  for  me."  This 
was  the  last  duty  of  your  delegation,  and 
this  report  briefly  represents  the  primary  ac 
tion  of  Livingston  county  in  giving  Abraham 
Lincoln  to  the  world. 

I  have  been  requested  to  refer  to  some 

94 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

personal  reminiscences  of  my  relations  with 
Mr.  Lincoln.  I  had  the  good  fortune  to  be 
come  acquainted  with  him  in  Bloomington  in 
1853,  when  I  was  division  engineer,  build 
ing  the  Chicago  &  Alton  Railroad.  Bloom 
ington  was  then  a  village  of  1 ,200  people, 
overcrowded  with  emigrants,  land  buyers, 
railway  contractors  and  laborers.  Being 
somewhat  permanently  located,  I  was  fortu 
nate  enough  to  have  a  large  room  on  the 
first  floor  of  my  boarding-house,  to  which 
circumstance  I  am  indebted  for  my  acquaint 
ance  with  Mr.  Lincoln.  On  a  hot  afternoon, 
I  think  in  the  autumn  season,  I  was  seated 
in  my  room  with  the  door  partly  open  to  the 
main  hall,  when  I  overheard  the  following 
conversation:  "Indeed,  if  you  cannot  ac 
commodate  me,  I  am  sure  I  do  not  know 
what  I  shall  do.  I  am  here  for  this  term 
of  the  Circuit  Court,  and  have  tried  every- 

95 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

where  to  find  accommodations,  but  so  far 
have  failed,  and  I  see  no  probability  of  suc 
cess  unless  you  can  care  for  me."  The  land 
lady,  to  whom  the  above  was  addressed,  re 
plied:  "Mr.  Lincoln,  I  would  like  very 
much  to  give  you  a  room  and  board  while 
you  are  in  the  city,  but  I  have  no  room  or 
bed  to  offer  you;  but  if  it  will  help  you 
any  to  come  here  for  your  meals,  I  will  do 
the  best  I  can  for  you."  "Well,"  said  Mr. 
Lincoln,  "you  are  very  kind,  but  I  have  no 
where  to  lay  my  head." 

Those  being  early  days  of  western  life, 
of  which  I  had  seen  something,  I  stepped 
to  the  hall  door  and  for  the  first  time  saw 
the  tall  man  of  destiny.  After  a  moment,  I 
said  to  the  landlady:  "Is  this  gentleman  a 
friend  of  yours?"  To  which  she  replied, 
introducing  him  as  "Mr.  Lincoln,  of  Spring 
field,  a  lawyer  who  is  practicing  in  the  court 

96 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

of  McLean  county.  He  is  a  friend  of  mine, 
and  I  am  very  sorry  indeed  that  I  am  unable 
to  accommodate  him."  After  looking  at 
Mr.  Lincoln  a  moment,  and  he  at  me,  with  a 
rather  inquiring  expression,  I  said:  "If  you 
will  put  a  bed  in  my  room,  which  is  too 
large  for  one  person  in  these  crowded  times, 
I  would  be  pleased  to  have  Mr.  Lincoln 
room  with  me  during  his  stay  in  the  city." 
As  I  finished  this  remark,  Lincoln  threw 
back  his  head  a  little,  and  with  it  the  long 
black  hair  that  came  over  his  forehead,  and 
said:  "Now,  that  is  what  I  call  clever." 

I  thus  became  the  roommate  of  the  great 
est  man  since  Washington,  the  peer  of  any 
man  in  the  love  of  liberty,  justice  and  mercy ; 
and  I  wish  to  record  here  that  during  the 
time  of  this  stay — several  weeks — I  learned 
from  him  many  things  which  have  been  of 
priceless  value  to  me. 

*In  common  western  parlance  the  word  "clever  '  was  often  used  in 
the  sense  oi  kind  or  accommodating. 

97 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

Although  his  time  was  very  much  en 
grossed  by  court  proceedings,  he  seemed  to 
strive,  although  I  was  twenty  years  his 
junior,  to  make  his  companionship  interesting 
and  serviceable  to  me.  I  was  told  by  him 
of  many  things  and  stories  of  the  earlier  set 
tlers  in  Illinois,  and  also  he  recited  selections 
of  poetry,  one  of  them  being  the  poem,  "Oh, 
why  should  the  spirit  of  mortal  be  proud?" 
of  which  he  was  very  fond. 

One  evening  he  said:  "The  people  of 
McLean  county,  before  they  became  inter 
ested  in  railway  construction,  and  when 
Pekin,  on  the  Illinois  River,  was  their  mar 
ket,  had  very  little  to  occupy  their  time,  espe 
cially  at  some  seasons  of  the  year.  They 
would  come  to  Bloomington  on  Saturdays 
with  all  sorts  of  vehicles — wagons,  carts,  and 
on  horseback — and  put  in  most  of  the  day 
in  fun,  horse  racing,  settling  old  feuds,  etc. 

98 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

When  evening  came  and  they  were  about  to 
separate  and  return  to  their  homes,  almost 
every  man,  besides  being  well  filled  before 
starting,  carried  with  him  a  good-sized  brown 
jug  in  the  front  end  of  his  wagon  or  cart." 

Speaking  of  the  relative  merits  of  New 
England  rum  and  corn  juice,  as  he  called  it, 
to  illuminate  the  human  mind,  he  told  me 
this  story  of  John  Moore,  who  resided  south 
of  Blooming  Grove,  and  subsequently  be 
came  State  Treasurer:  Mr.  Moore  came  to 
Bloomington  one  Saturday  in  a  cart  drawn 
by  a  fine  pair  of  young  red  steers.  For  some 
reason  he  was  a  little  late  starting  home,  and 
besides  his  brown  jug,  he  otherwise  had  a 
good  load  on.  In  passing  through  the  grove 
that  night,  one  wheel  of  his  cart  struck  a 
stump  or  root  and  threw  the  pole  out  of  the 
ring  of  the  yoke.  The  steers,  finding  them 
selves  free,  ran  away,  and  left  John  Moore 

99 


LINCOLN     —     By      MEN 

sound  asleep  in  his  cart,  where  he  remained 
all  night.  Early  in  the  morning  he  roused 
himself,  and  looking  over  the  side  of  the 
cart  and  around  in  the  woods,  he  said:  "If 
my  name  is  John  Moore,  I've  lost  a  pair  of 
steers;  if  my  name  ain't  John  Moore,  I've 
found  a  cart."  After  a  good  laugh  together, 
Lincoln  said:  "Morgan,  if  you  ever  tell  this 
story,  you  must  add  that  Moore  told  it  on 
himself." 

On  the  adjournment  of  the  Circuit  Court, 
Mr.  Lincoln  returned  to  Springfield,  after 
which  I  only  met  him  incidentally  when  visit 
ing  Springfield,  until  the  following  autumn, 
when  I  became  superintendent  of  the  Chi 
cago  &  Alton  Railway,  soon  after  which  I 
engaged  the  services  of  Mr.  Lincoln  as  attor 
ney  and  counselor  for  the  company,  and 
thereafter  had  frequent  business  intercourse 
with  him. 

too 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

It  is  not  necessary  for  me  to  speak  of  his 
then  acknowledged  ability  at  the  bar,  but  to 
illustrate  his  touch  of  humor  and  knowledge 
of  human  nature,  which  was  ever  present 
with  him,  I  quote  a  letter  which  I  received 
from  him,  inclosing  an  expired  annual  pass 
for  1855,  and  requesting  its  renewal,  which 
was  due  him  as  counsel  for  the  company : 

"Springfield,   Feb.    13,    1856.  — R.   P. 

Morgan,  Esq. :  Says  Tom  to  John,  'Here's 
your  old  rotten  wheelbarrow.  I've  broke  it 
usin'  on  it.  I  wish  you  would  mend  it,  'case 
I  shall  want  to  borrow  it  this  arternoon.' 
Acting  on  this  as  a  precedent,  I  say,  *Here's 
your  old  *chalked  hat.'  I  wish  you  would 
take  it  and  send  me  a  new  one,  'case  I  shall 
want  to  use  it  by  the  1st  of  March.'  Yours 
truly,  A.  Lincoln." 

I  have  always  understood  that  this  letter 
was  written  to  me  more  as  an  acquaintance 
and  friend  than  in  my  official  capacity.  The 
expression  "chalked  hat"  was  at  that  era,  in 

101 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

railroading,  at  least,  quite  generally  used  in 
connection  with  persons  who  were  fortunate 
enough  to  possess  annual  passes,  and  when 
they  were  called  upon  by  the  conductors,  the 
holders  would  say,  "I  have  a  chalked  hat," 
or,  in  brief,  "I  chalk." 

It  was  in  the  summer  of  the  year  that  I 
received  this  letter  —  1 856  —  that  I  stood 
next  to  Mr.  Lincoln  and  heard  him  say: 
"You  can  fool  some  of  the  people  all  of  the 
time,  and  all  of  the  people  some  of  the  time, 
but  you  can't  fool  all  of  the  people  all  of 
the  time."  He  was  addressing  an  assem 
blage  of  about  three  or  four  hundred  people 
from  the  raised  platform  of  the  entrance  to 
the  Pike  House,  in  Bloomington,  111.,  upon 
the  subject  of  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act, 
and  reviewing  the  arguments  of  Douglas  in 
support  of  it.  His  application  of  his  epi 
gram  was  so  apt  and  so  forcible  that  I  have 

102 


WHO         K    N    E    W        HIM 

never  forgotten  it,  and  I  believe  that  no 
verbal  modification  of  it  would  be  accurate. 
In  his  final  peroration  of  that  address,  refer 
ring  again  to  the  arguments  favoring  the 
Kansas-Nebraska  Act,  he  said,  with  wonder 
ful  energy  and  earnestness:  "Surely,  surely, 
my  friends,  you  cannot  be  deceived  by  such 
sophistries." 

The  occurrences  of  which  I  have  spoken 
were  all  anterior  to  the  war  to  preserve  the 
Union.  Among  some  treasures  I  have  is  an 
autograph  letter,  written  in  1863,  in  which 
Mr.  Lincoln  declares  himself  to  be  my  per 
sonal  acquaintance  and  friend. 

I  consider  it  my  duty  to  mention  one  fact 
that  may  otherwise  be  lost  in  the  history  of 
our  county,  as  seemingly  there  is  no  record 
of  it.  Upon  the  call  of  President  Lincoln 
for  75,000  volunteers,  "Flaming  Giants" 
did  spring  from  the  cornfields  of  Livingston 

103 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

county.  On  the  1 6th  of  April,  the  morning 
after  the  call,  at  5  o'clock,  I  had  the  honor 
of  standing  at  the  door  of  the  Adjutant  Gen 
eral's  office  in  the  old  State  House  at  Spring 
field,  holding  in  my  hand  a  muster  roll  of 
eighty  volunteers  from  Livingston  county.  It 
was  recorded  as  No.  13,  twelve  others  only 
standing  ahead  of  me  in  the  line,  and  before 
the  office  opened  there  were  as  many  behind 
me,  holding  up  their  muster  rolls.  These 
volunteers  from  Livingston  county  were  not 
mustered  in  as  a  company,  because  there 
were  more  volunteers  in  the  State  at  large 
than  its  quota  under  that  call.  Most  of  these 
men  immediately  sought  service  in  Regiments 
Seven  to  Twelve,  inclusive,  which  consti 
tuted  the  First  Brigade  of  Illinois  Volunteers, 
organized  from  April  25  to  May  10,  1861. 


104 


Recollections  of 
Judge  Franklin  Blades 


JUDGE  FRANKLIN  BLADES 


JUDGE  FRANKLIN  BLADES 

Judge  Franklin  Blades  was  born  November  29, 
1830.  in  Rush  County,  Indiana.  He  was  the  son 
of  a  country  physician,  but  lost  his  father  at  the 
age  of  sixteen.  In  his  youth,  there  were  few  schools 
in  Indiana,  and  none  free.  He  therefore  got  in 
youth  only  such  education  as  he  could  pick  up  at 
home  and  under  private  tutors.  He  was,  however, 
fortunate  enough  to  acquire  in  his  youth  a  love 
for  good  books,  and  in  time  he  became  a  man  of 
cultivated  mind  through  the  study  of  such  authors 
as  Irving,  Goldsmith,  Johnson,  Shakespeare,  Ad- 
dison  and  others.  In  1852  he  graduated  from  the 
Rush  Medical  College  of  Chicago,  and  subse 
quently  took  post-graduate  courses  in  medicine 
in  the  University  of  Pennsylvania  and  in  Jefferson 
Medical  College  at  Philadelphia.  He  early  settled 
down  to  his  life  work  at  Watseka,  Illinois.  He 
was  the  editor  of  a  republican  newspaper,  support 
ing  Fremont  for  the  presidency  in  1856.  In  the 
latter  year  he  was  also  elected  to  the  Illinois  Legis 
lature.  Again,  in  1860,  he  was  elected  and 
served  in  the  legislature. 
107 


In  1858,  having  studied  law  in  the  meantime, 
he  was  admitted  to  the  Illinois  bar.  Subsequently, 
in  1862,  he  reverted  to  his  original  profession  of 
medicine  long  enough  to  serve  as  surgeon  of  the 
76th  Illinois  Infantry.  In  1864  he  was  a  Repub 
lican  presidential  elector  for  Illinois,  and  had  the 
satisfaction  of  voting  for  his  friend,  Abraham 
Lincoln,  for  his  second  term.  In  1877  Blades  was 
elected  to  the  circuit  bench  for  a  short  term,  and 
in  June,  1879,  he  was  re-elected  for  a  full  term  of 
six  years.  In  January,  1888,  because  of  ill  health, 
he  removed  to  California,  and  is  now  living  and 
raising  oranges  at  Pomona  in  that  State.  A  short 
biography  of  himself  which  the  Judge  prepared 
for  the  publishers  of  this  book,  closes  with  these 
modest  words: 

"And  now  as  I  near  the  close  of  my  long  life 
I  recall  with  affection,  and  almost  tearful 
gratitude,  the  memory  of  the  many  friends  whose 
kindly  offices  did  so  much  to  promote  such  success 
as  I  have  had,  and  which  I  think  quite  equal  to 
my  merits." 


108 


Recollections  oi 
Judge  Franklin  Blades 


I  had  some  personal  acquaintance  with 
Mr.  Lincoln.  The  first  time  I  met  him 
was  in  a  caucus  of  the  Republican  members 
of  the  Illinois  House  of  Representatives,  of 
which  I  was  a  member,  in  the  winter  of 
1857.  The  meeting  was  held  in  Mr.  Lin 
coln's  office  in  Springfield,  Illinois.  I  was 
much  interested  in  observing  his  homely, 
friendly,  cordial  manners,  and  the  candor 
and  good  sense  in  what  he  had  to  say. 
There  were  those  of  the  Senate  and  House 
who  had  been  elected  in  opposition  to  Dem 
ocratic  candidates,  but  who  had  not  become 
identified  with  the  new  Republican  party. 
These  men  not  long  afterward  became  Re- 

109 


LINCOLN     —      By      MEN 

publicans.  Among  these  was  Senator  Gil- 
lespie,  subsequently  generally  known  as 
Judge  Gillespie.  He  had  been  an  old  Whig 
friend  of  Mr.  Lincoln.  During  the  session 
of  our  caucus,  Mr.  Lincoln  said:  "Boys, 
what  do  you  say  to  having  old  Joe  Gillespie 
in  here?"  There  being  general  assent,  the 
Senator  was  sent  for,  and  it  was  interesting 
to  see  the  cordial,  friendly  manner  in  which 
they  greeted  each  other.  I  afterward  came 
to  know  Judge  Gillespie  quite  well,  and 
have  heard  him  say  many  an  affectionate 
word  concerning  his  old  friend,  years  after 
that  old  friend  had,  by  the  universal  acclaim 
of  mankind,  been  enshrined  among  the  im 
mortals. 

I  once  attended  a  reception  by  Mr.  and 
Mrs.   Lincoln   at   their   old-fashioned   resi 
dence  in  Springfield.     The  invitation  I  re 
ceived  was  in  the  handwriting  of  Mr.  Lin- 
no 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

coin.  I  have  it  yet.  The  guests  were  re 
ceived  in  an  informal  and  friendly  manner 
by  Mrs.  Lincoln.  On  being  ushered  up 
stairs  I  found  Mr.  Lincoln  and  the  Demo 
cratic  State  Auditor,  whose  name,  as  I  re 
member  it,  was  Jones,  sitting  on  a  high  post 
bed,  chatting  with  each  other,  Mr.  Lincoln 
particularly  greeting  all  who  came  into  the 
room.  Mr.  Lincoln  was  not  then  talked  of 
for  the  presidency — certainly  not  outside  of 
his  own  State. 

In  the  spring  of  1858,  having  been  ad 
mitted  to  the  bar,  and  intending  to  give  up 
the  profession  of  medicine,  I  wrote  to  Mr. 
Lincoln,  requesting  the  use  of  his  name  as 
a  reference  on  my  professional  card  as  a 
lawyer.  He  had  known  me  as  a  physician, 
and  in  writing  to  him  I  said  nothing  about 
my  change  of  profession,  and  so  in  replying 
he  seemed  to  be  in  doubt  as  to  whether  I 

ill 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

was  the  same  Blades  he  had  known.  So 
he  wrote:  "I  do  not  know  whether  you  are 
Dr.  Blades  or  not.  If  you  are  Dr.  Blades, 
you  may  use  my  name;  if  you  are  not  Dr. 
Blades,  if  Dr.  Blades  says  you  may  use 
my  name,  you  may  do  so." 

Some  time  afterward  I  met  him  in  Spring 
field,  and  taking  me  by  the  hand  he  said, 
with  an  amused  twinkle  in  his  eye:  "You 
got  my  letter,  did  you?"  And  then  he  re 
peated  it.  The  excuse  I  offer  for  intro 
ducing  this  incident,  so  personal  to  myself, 
is  its  quaintness  of  style,  so  characteristic  of 
him,  and  so  graphically  apparent  in  the 
famous  and  caustic  reply  to  Mr.  Greeley. 
I  don't  know  what  became  of  the  letter,  but 
I  think  that  it  was  stolen  from  among  my 
papers  when  packing  for  my  move  to  Cali 
fornia. 

I  was  a  member  of  the  Republican  State 

112 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

convention  of  1858,  before  which  Lincoln 
made  the  famous  speech  in  which  he  re 
peated  the  saying  of  Christ,  that  a  house 
divided  against  itself  cannot  stand,  and  in 
which  he  contended  that  the  States  of  the 
Union  must  all  become  free  or  all  slave. 
He  gave  no  hint  that  he  was  in  favor  of  divi 
sion,  or  that  he  was  in  favor  of  the  domestic 
institutions  of  all  the  States  becoming  the 
same;  but  Stephen  A.  Douglas,  in  cam 
paigning  over  the  State,  seeking  re-election 
as  Senator,  perverted  and  misstated  and  mis 
represented  what  he  said,  and  contended  that 
Mr.  Lincoln  was  really  in  favor  of  making 
the  domestic  institutions  the  same  in  all  the 
States.  Mr.  Lincoln  had  said  that  he  did 
not  believe  that  the  Union  would  be  dis 
solved,  but  did  believe  that  the  opponents 
of  slavery  would  arrest  the  further  spread 
of  it,  and  place  it  where  the  public  mind 

113 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

would  rest  in  the  belief  that  it  was  in  the 
course  of  ultimate  extinction;  or  its  advo 
cates  "would  push  it  forward,  till  it  would 
become  alike  lawful  in  all  the  States,  old 
as  well  as  new,  North  as  well  as  South." 
His  manner  of  delivery  of  that  speech  was 
calm,  deliberate,  dispassionate  and  without 
a  single  gesture.  There  were  over-cautious 
Republicans  who  thought  that  he  had  bet 
ter  have  omitted  some  things  that  he  said; 
and,  in  fact,  it  formed  the  principal  capital 
stock  of  Mr.  Douglas  in  his  campaign  for 
the  senatorship;  but  the  result  demonstrated 
that  Lincoln  was  a  great  political  prophet 
and  statesman. 

I  was  a  delegate  to  the  State  Republican 
convention  which  met  at  Decatur,  the  county 
seat  of  Macon  county,  in  1860,  which  se 
lected  the  delegates  to  the  National  Conven 
tion,  then  soon  to  meet  in  Chicago  for  the 

114 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

purpose  of  nominating  a  candidate  for  the 
presidency,  and  which  instructed  those  dele 
gates  to  support  Mr.  Lincoln's  candidacy. 
Mr.  Lincoln  was  present  and  was  seated  on 
the  platform  during  the  session  of  the  con 
vention.  While  the  convention  was  in  ses 
sion,  Mr.  Hanks,  a  cousin  of  Mr.  Lincoln, 
and  another  man  came  into  the  hall,  bear 
ing  aloft  two  old  rails,  between  which  was 
stretched  a  banner  on  which  was  printed  the 
statement  that  the  rails  were  a  part  of  a  lot 
of  rails  made  by  Mr.  Lincoln  in  the  county 
of  Macon,  many  years  before.  Mr.  Hanks 
had  at  the  time  worked  with  Mr.  Lincoln 
in  making  the  rails,  and  personally  no  doubt 
remembered  better  than  Mr.  Lincoln  could 
then  recall  that  the  statement  was  true. 
When  the  rails  were  brought  in,  the  entire 
body  of  the  delegates  rose  to  their  feet,  wav 
ing  their  hats  and  cheering  at  the  top  of 

115 


LINCOLN      —     By      MEN 

their  voices,  and  shouting,  "Lincoln!  Lin 
coln!  Lincoln!"  He  came  to  the  front  of 
the  platform  looking  very  much  amused, 
holding  his  hands  folded  in  front  of  him. 
He  spoke  briefly,  saying  it  was  true  that 
when  he  was  a  young  man  he  made  some 
rails  in  Macon  county,  but  he  really  could 
not  say  whether  the  rails  brought  in  by  Mr. 
Hanks  were  a  part  of  the  lot  or  not.  I 
have  seen  a  statement  in  some  magazine  that 
this  incident  occurred  in  the  National  Con 
vention  at  Chicago,  but  I  personally  know 
that  it  did  not,  for  I  was  present  in  both  con 
ventions,  though  not  a  delegate  in  the  Chi 
cago  convention.  Of  course,  it  would  not 
have  been  tolerated  in  the  National  Conven 
tion,  where  there  was  more  than  one  candi 
date  for  the  nomination. 

I  do  not  think  that  Mr.  Lincoln  was  very 
confident  of  being  nominated  at  Chicago.  A 

116 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

friend  and  neighbor  of  his  from  Springfield 
said  that  before  coming  away  he  inquired  of 
him  if  he  was  going  to  attend  the  conven 
tion.  Mr.  Lincoln  replied  that  he  was  not; 
that  he  was  most  too  much  of  a  candidate 
to  attend,  and  hardly  enough  of  a  candidate 
to  stay  away. 

I  was  considerably  younger  than  Mr.  Lin 
coln  and,  besides,  did  not  see  him  frequently 
enough  to  become  on  terms  of  intimacy  with 
him.  He  knew  enough  of  me  to  regard  me 
as  a  personal  and  political  friend,  and  I  knew 
enough  of  him  to  know  that  many  of  the 
purported  anecdotes  that  I  have  often  read 
of  him  were  gross  and  scandalous  caricatures 
of  him.  He  was  hearty  and  cordial  in  man 
ner  toward  those  with  whom  he  was  on  terms 
of  friendship.  I  was  particularly  indignant 
when  I  read  the  coarse  and  vulgar  fiction  of 
him  which  appeared  in  "The  Crisis."  The 

117 


LINCOLN      —     By      MEN 

vulgar,  ill-bred  familiarity  which,  in  "The 
Crisis",  characterizes  the  supposed  intercourse 
between  Mr.  Lincoln  and  Mr.  Joseph  Medill 
is  repulsive  and  without  the  least  foundation 
in  the  character  of  either  of  them.  Medill 
was  considerably  younger  than  Mr.  Lincoln, 
and  had  no  intimate  or  long-standing  ac 
quaintance  with  him.  While  Mr.  Lincoln 
was  not  in  the  least  assertive  of  his  dignity 
and  self-respect,  yet  there  was  that  about 
him  which  would  prevent  any  one  from  slap 
ping  him  on  the  back  and  calling  him  "Abe," 
except  it  might  possibly  be  the  few  who  were 
familiar  with  him  from  his  young  manhood 
and  who  had  kept  pace  with  him  in  his  grad 
ually  increasing  social  standing. 

In  the  long  past  I  occasionally  heard  inter 
esting  and  amusing  anecdotes  of  Mr.  Lin 
coln  by  Judge  Weldon  and  others  who  used 
to  meet  him  at  the  bar  of  the  old  eighth 

118 


WHO         KNEW        HIM 

judicial  circuit,  in  which  Judge  David  Davis 
presided,  but  I  cannot  recall  them  with  suffi 
cient  distinctness  to  make  it  worth  while  to 
relate  them.  It  is  true  I  might  supply  the 
want  of  memory  by  fictions,  as  some  of  his 
biographers  have  done. 

An  anecdote  told  me  many  years  ago  by 
my  friend  Beckwith,  a  lawyer  of  Danville, 
Illinois,  now  lamented  as  dead,  I  will  ven 
ture  to  relate.  Mr.  Lincoln  and  Mr.  Vor- 
hees,  a  distinguished  lawyer,  a  sometime 
United  States  Senator  for  Indiana,  were  en 
gaged  on  opposite  sides  of  a  suit  in  the  Cir 
cuit  Court  of  Danville.  In  arguing  a  ques 
tion  to  the  judge,  Mr.  Vorhees  made  some 
discourteous  and  rather  offensive  remarks 
about  Mr.  Lincoln.  When  Mr.  Lincoln 
came  to  reply  he  so  unmercifully  and  at  the 
same  time  so  humorously  ridiculed  Mr.  Vor- 

119 


LINCOLN     —      By      MEN 

hees  that  some  of  the  lawyers  ran  out  of  the 
court  house  and  lay  down  on  the  grass  in 
explosions  of  laughter.  Mr.  Vorhees  took 
great  offense,  and  in  the  evening  called  at 
the  room  where  Mr.  Lincoln,  Judge  Davis 
and  some  others  were  engaged  in  social  chat, 
and  furiously  assailed — not  assaulted — Mr. 
Lincoln,  but  he  came  off  much  worsted,  as 
he  had  in  the  discussion  before  the  judge. 

It  is  much  to  be  lamented  that  Judge 
David  Davis  did  not  leave  on  record  his 
recollections  of  Mr.  Lincoln.  Mr.  Lincoln 
practiced  many  years  before  him,  and  they 
were  probably  on  more  intimate  terms  than 
any  others  after  Mr.  Lincoln  began  the  prac 
tice  of  the  law.  Judge  Davis  was  a  man 
of  infinite  humor,  which  often  cropped  out 
while  on  the  bench,  and  could  heartily  appre 
ciate  the  humor  of  Mr.  Lincoln.  Why  did 

120 


WHO         K     N     E     W         HIM 

he  not  leave  memoirs  of  his  intimate  friend, 
to  be  read  through  all  time? 

In  1861  I  was  a  member  of  the  Illinois 
House  of  Representatives,  elected  as  a  Re 
publican,  and  was  present  during  the  entire 
regular  session,  beginning  in  January,  and 
also  attended  the  special  session  convened  in 
April,  on  the  calling  for  75,000  troops  by 
the  President  on  the  fall  of  Fort  Sumter. 
That  winter,  during  the  sitting  of  the  regu 
lar  session,  was  the  most  gloomy  and  de 
spondent  period  of  my  life.  I  felt  sure  that 
the  Southern  States  meant  permanent  seces 
sion  even  if  they  had  to  fight  for  it.  But 
they  did  not  anticipate  civil  war.  In  the 
South  it  was  generally  believed  that  the 
people  of  the  North  were  so  commercialized 
and  were  so  divided  in  partisanship  that  war 
for  the  Union  would  be  "impossible."  On 

121 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

the  other  hand,  the  levity  with  which  the 
secession  movement  was  for  the  most  part 
regarded  by  Republicans,  and  which  was 
distinctly  manifest  among  the  Republican 
members  of  the  legislature,  to  me  was  inex 
plicable  and  depressing.  Sensible  men,  and 
even  good  friends,  regarded  my  gloomy  ap 
prehension  as  next  thing  to  absurd. 

During  the  session  of  the  legislature,  a 
convention  of  the  Democracy  was  held  in 
the  hall  which  had  been  given  up  to  them 
by  vote  of  the  House.  I  was  a  lobby  on 
looker  of  that  convention,  and  the  incendiary 
speeches  which  were  made  and  applauded 
to  the  echo,  and  the  misapprehensions  of  Mr. 
Lincoln,  were  so  vividly  impressed  on  my 
memory  that  now,  nearly  fifty  years  after, 
they  are  recalled  with  almost  startling  dis 
tinctness.  Among  my  papers  I  have  pre- 
122 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

served  a  copy  of  the  Missouri  Republican 
(now  the  Missouri  Republic),  of  the  date 
of  January  19,  1861,  purporting  to  give  a 
verbatim  report  of  the  speeches.  Among  the 
most  eloquent  was  that  of  Henry  S.  Fitch, 
Buchanan's  United  States  District  Attorney 
for  the  Northern  District  of  Illinois.  The 
speech  itself  was  not  disloyal,  but  the  re 
sponses  it  drew  out  showed  the  temper  of 
the  members  to  be  as  favorable  to  the  South 
as  the  most  fiery  secessionist  could  wish. 
Fitch  played  on  that  convention  as  if  it  were 
a  musical  instrument.  Among  other  things, 
he  said:  "This  Union  was  purchased  by 
blood;  it  was  cemented  by  blood;  and  isn't 
it  worth  saving  by  blood  now?"  "No, 
No!"  was  the  universal  response.  "I  say 
it  is,"  said  he,  and  that  was  hissed.  And 
then  he  said,  "But  blood  won't  save  it,"  and 

123 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

that  was  uproariously  applauded.  The  re 
port  in  the  paper  states  that  when  he  said  it 
was  worth  saving  by  blood  he  was  greatly 
applauded,  but  that  applause  came  from  Re 
publicans  who  had  gathered  in  the  lobby. 
Poor,  dear,  loyal,  brilliantly  eloquent  fel 
low!  he  died  in  the  far  South,  a  major  in 
the  Union  army. 

A  Mr.  William  Homes  made  a  speech. 
Among  other  things,  he  said : 

"Gentlemen  of  the  Convention  and  Fel 
low  Citizens:  I  know  one  thing  to  be  true: 
that  it  would  be  no  difficult  matter  to  pro 
duce  civil  war  in  Illinois.  I  know  that  the 
state  of  feeling  which  might  be  fanned  into 
a  flame  is  so  deep  here  in  this  city  now  that, 
if  it  correctly  represents,  as  I  believe  it  does, 
the  feelings  of  the  State,  it  might  break  out 
into  an  act  of  secession  at  home,  and  Illinois 
thus  become  a  divided  State." 

124 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

R.  T.  Merrick,  of  Chicago,  among  many 
other  things,  said : 

"I  feel  that  I  cannot  be  in  error  when  I 
say  that  this  Union  never  can  be  saved  fop 
force.  Coercion! — force!  This  is  war — 
war  upon  the  Southern  States — not  on  South 
Carolina  alone — not  on  the  cotton  States 
alone — but  upon  the  entire  South.  For  be 
assured,  gentlemen,  that  whether  the  border 
States  follow  the  secession  of  States  of  the 
extreme  South  or  not,  they  will  most  cer 
tainly  regard  any  hostile  attack  upon  these 
Southern  States  as  an  attack  upon  them 
selves.  It  will  be  a  war,  then,  upon  fifteen 
States.  Are  you  prepared  for  such  a  war? 
(Shouts  of  Wo,  no!  Fight  here!')  No, 
gentlemen,  thank  God!  fanaticism  has  not 
yet  so  hardened  our  hearts  that  we  are  ready 
to  imbrue  our  hands  in  the  blood  of  our 
brothers.  (Applause.)  Such  a  war  would 

125 


L   I   N   C   OLN     —      By      MEN 

be  most  accursed,  wicked,  unjust,  cruel  and 
diabolical ;  and  if  the  Republican  leaders  ex 
pect  that  it  would  be  a  war  in  the  Southern 
States — a  war  at  a  distance  so  far  removed 
from  the  North  that  those  who  had  brought 
it  on  would  not  even  be  disturbed  by  the  roar 
of  its  cannon,  let  them  undeceive  themselves 
at  once.  The  tone  and  feeling  of  this  conven 
tion  responds  to  my  own ;  and  I  am  satisfied 
that,  if  such  a  conflict  ever  comes,  it  will  be 
war  in  the  North,  and  not  "war  in  the  South. 
(Applause.)  It  will  be  war  in  Chicago — 
war  in  Springfield — war  on  the  broad  prai 
ries  of  Illinois.  (Loud  applause.)  Before 
the  patriotic  people  of  this  State  will  allow 
an  invading  force  to  pass  beyond  its  borders 
to  subjugate  the  South,  they  will  make  one 
vast  mausoleum  of  your  State.  (Continued 
applause.)" 

Mr.  Richardson,  not  long  before  a  Sen- 

126 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

ator  of  the  United  States,  in  his  speech  to 
the  convention,  said:  "Why,  Mr.  Lincoln 
has  said,  and  Mr.  Seward  has  said,  'Away 
with  this  doctrine  of  the  inequality  of  races. 
It  is  in  violation  of  the  Declaration  of  Inde 
pendence.  The  government  cannot  endure 
half  slave  and  half  free.'  Mr.  Seward  said 
in  Ohio:  'You,  my  friends,  must  turn  in 
and  help  me;  we  can  extinguish  this  thing 
of  slavery.'  '  How  false  he  must  have 
known  his  words  to  be ! 

Now,  at  the  time  this  convention  was 
being  held,  the  South  Carolina  legislature 
was  pushing  through  a  bill  to  call  out  and 
arm  1 0,000  troops ;  and  batteries  were  being 
erected  to  bombard  Fort  Sumter.  Four 
States  had  already  seceded.  Senators  and 
representatives  from  these  States  were  resign 
ing  from  the  House  and  Senate.  And  yet, 
if  this  threatened  war  on  the  part  of  the 

127 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

South  were  resisted,  we  were  told  there 
would  be  war  in  Illinois — war  in  Chicago. 
No  word  of  sympathy  for  Mr.  Lincoln,  who, 
in  his  home,  not  much  more  than  a  stone's 
throw  from  the  hall  of  the  convention,  was 
brooding  sadly,  weighed  down  with  the 
awful  responsibility  that  rested  on  him  to 
save  the  Union,  if,  in  the  face  of  a  united 
South,  and  the  great  body  of  an  intensely 
hostile  party  in  the  North,  it  could  be  saved. 
Everything  was  said  calculated  to  encourage 
the  secessionists.  Mr.  Lincoln  and  the  man 
he  had  determined  on  to  be  his  Secretary 
of  State  were  misrepresented  as  holding  senti 
ments  hostile  to  the  South,  which  they  had 
never  expressed,  and  did  not  entertain.  I 
relate  these  things  here  to  show  the  situation 
—  the  awfully  discouraging  situation  —  that 
Mr.  Lincoln  faced  in  January,  1861. 

Governor  Yates  was  condemned  for  rec- 

128 


WHO        KNEW        HIM 

ommending  a  reorganization  of  the  militia. 
In  the  House  a  Democrat  (Green  of  Mas- 
sac)  moved  to  amend  the  militia  bill  by  pro 
viding  that  the  militia  be  armed  with  corn 
stalks;  and  yet  these  people  professed  to  be 
in  favor  of  the  Union.  Yes;  but  it  was  to 
be  only  such  a  Union  as  would  be  satisfac 
tory  to  the  most  radical  of  the  slaveholders. 
But  even  that  sort  of  a  Union  these  slave 
holders  would  not  then  have  accepted.  They 
disliked  the  Northern  people.  They  were 
more  unlike  the  Northern  people  than  they 
were  unlike  the  people  of  England.  Their 
manners  were  different  from  ours.  Their 
education  had  been  different.  Their  dialect 
was  different.  Slavery  had  made  them  aris 
tocrats.  They  placed  the  laboring  man  on 
a  level  with  their  negroes.  They  expected 
to  win  without  civil  war.  And  they  would 
have  won  had  they  not  fired  a  gun — if  they 
had  not  attacked  Fort  Sumter. 

-9  129 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

The  Springfield  convention,  in  response  to 
Democratic  conventions  which  had  been  held 
in  Kentucky  and  Indiana,  as  a  means  of  con 
ciliating  the  South,  recommended  the  calling 
of  a  convention  of  all  the  States  to  amend  the 
constitution.  The  Missouri  Republican,  in 
an  editorial  discussing  this  method  of  settling 
the  trouble,  recommended  that  resort  to  se 
cession  as  a  remedy  should  be  had  only  after 
"all  other  means  of  reconciliation  have  been 
exhausted." 

In  the  midst  of  the  gloom  and  portents  of 
the  on-coming  tragedy  of  civil  war,  Mr.  Lin 
coln  showed  a  willingness  to  conciliate  the 
great  Northern  party  which  was  so  thought 
lessly  feeding  the  fires  of  secession.  He  was 
willing  to  concede  something  in  the  way  of 
compromise  which  did  not  contemplate  a 
surrender  of  the  principles  of  which  he  had 
been  the  foremost  advocate,  and  which  he 

130 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

deemed  not  to  be  inconsistent  with  the  do 
mestic  institutions  of  the  slaveholding  States ; 
for  he  was  naturally  a  conservative  man,  and 
always  held  that  by  virtue  of  the  constitu 
tion  the  slaveholder  was  entitled  to  have  his 
fugitive  slaves  returned  to  him.  No  com 
promise  could  be  framed  that  would  stop 
the  agitation  by  those  in  the  North  who  be 
lieved  that  slavery  was  sinful.  He,  with 
the  great  majority  of  the  North,  believed 
slavery  to  be  wrong,  but  they  faithfully  re 
garded  the  constitutional  obligation  to  pro 
tect  it  in  the  slaveholding  States.  Nor  could 
any  compromise  prevent  the  operations  of 
the  underground  railroad,  which  but  few, 
comparatively,  were  engaged  in  conducting, 
but  in  the  operation  of  which  everybody 
would  have  taken  part  if  secession  had  suc 
ceeded. 

Deeming  it  not  unwise  to  make  some  re- 

131 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

sponse  to  the  sentiment  which  seemed  to  be 
so  extensively  entertained,  not  only  in  Illi 
nois,  but  throughout  the  North,  in  favor  of 
offering  compromise,  as  expressed  by  the  Illi 
nois  convention,  even  if  no  other  effect  should 
be  produced  than  to  demonstrate  the  folly 
of  expecting  that  the  South  would  enter 
tain  any  proposition  of  compromise  whatever, 
Mr.  Lincoln  drafted  a  preamble  and  resolu 
tions  which  he  caused  to  be  adopted  by  the 
Illinois  legislature,  which  were  entered  in  the 
House  and  Senate  journals,  as  follows: 

"Mr.  Jarrot,  from  the  Committee  on  Fed 
eral  Relations,  to  which  was  referred  sundry 
resolutions  referring  to  the  condition  of  the 
Union,  reported  the  same  back  with  the  fol 
lowing  preamble  and  resolutions: 

"WHEREAS,  Although  the  people  of  the 
State  of  Illinois  do  not  desire  any  change  in 
our  Federal  Constitution,  yet  as  several  of 
our  sister  States  have  indicated  that  they 
deem  it  necessary  that  some  amendment 
should  be  made  thereto;  and 

132 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

"WHEREAS,  In  and  by  the  Fifth  Article 
of  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States,  pro 
vision  is  made  for  proposing  amendments  to 
that  instrument,  either  by  Congress  or  by  a 
convention;  and 

"WHEREAS,  A  desire  has  been  expressed 
in  various  parts  of  the  United  States  for  a 
convention  to  propose  amendments  to  the 
Constitution;  therefore,  be  it 

"Resolved  by  the  General  Assembly  of 
the  State  of  Illinois,  That  if  application  shall 
be  made  to  Congress  by  any  of  the  States 
deeming  themselves  aggrieved,  to  call  a  con 
vention,  in  accordance  with  the  constitu 
tional  provision  aforesaid,  to  propose  amend 
ments  to  the  Constitution  of  these  United 
States,  that  the  Legislature  of  the  State  of 
Illinois  will  and  does  hereby  concur  in  mak 
ing  such  application. 

"Resolved,  That  until  the  people  of  these 
United  States  shall  otherwise  direct,  the 
present  Federal  Union  must  be  preserved  as 
it  is,  and  the  present  Constitution  and  laws 
must  be  administered  as  they  are;  and  to 
this  end,  in  conformity  to  that  Constitution 
and  the  laws,  the  whole  resources  of  the 
State  of  Illinois  are  hereby  pledged  to  the 
Federal  authorities. 

133 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

"Resolved,  That  copies  of  the  above  pre 
amble  and  resolutions  be  sent  to  each  of  the 
Representatives  and  Senators  in  Congress 
and  to  the  Executives  of  the  several 
States."* 

This  important  document  has  so  far  es 
caped  the  historian,  for  at  the  time  of  its 
passage  it  did  not  purport  to  come  from 
Lincoln.  There  is  no  record  that  he  had 
anything  to  do  with  it;  nor  was  it  publicly 
given  out  that  he  wrote  the  resolutions.  But 
I  know  very  well  that  he  did  write  them. 
It  was  not  concealed  from  the  Republican 
members  of  the  Legislature  that  he  wrote 
them.  I  was  very  well  acquainted  with 
every  Republican  member,  and  I  know  that 
no  one  of  them  claimed  to  be  the  author.  I 
do  not  remember  who  introduced  them,  nor, 


*The  preamble  and  resolutions  were  voted  on  separately  and  as  a 
whole  and  adopted  by  the  House.  (House  Journal,  pp.  301,  302, 
303,  304,  Feb  1.)  Concurred  in  by  Senate.  (Senate  Journal,  p. 
231,  Feb.  2,  1861.)  Concurrence  reported  back  to  House.  (House 
Journal,  p.  534,  Feb.  13,  1861.)  Printed  also  in  the  public  laws  of 
1861,  P.  281. 

134 


WHO         KNEW        HIM 

indeed,  that  anyone  did.  I  have  the  impres 
sion,  though  indistinct  after  the  lapse  of 
nearly  fifty  years,  that  no  one  did,  but  that 
they  were  privately  handed  to  Mr.  Vital 
Jarrot,  chairman  of  the  Committee  on  Fed 
eral  Relations,  and  by  him  reported  to  the 
House.  I  sat  near  Mr.  Jarrot  during  the 
entire  session  and  was  on  familiar,  almost 
intimate,  terms  with  him.  I  think  it  was 
from  him  that  I  received  my  impression  as 
to  the  authorship.  Mr.  Jarrot  was  a  most 
excellent,  sensible  gentleman  and  a  true  pa 
triot.  He  was  one  of  the  not  many  Repub 
lican  members  of  the  House  who  deemed  it 
important  that  some  offer  of  compromise 
should  be  made,  though  having  but  little 
faith  that  any  offer  would  be  accepted  by 
the  Southern  people.  He  thought  that  it 
should  be  offered  for  its  effect  on  our  politi 
cal  opponents,  if  no  other  benefit  should 
come  of  it. 

135 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

It  failed  to  effect  anything,  and  it  remained 
for  the  firing  on  Sumter  to  disabuse  the 
minds  of  those  who  professed  to  be  hopeful 
that  the  South  would  yield  to  compromise. 
The  many  thousands  of  Southern  Illinois, 
relied  on  by  the  Springfield  orators  to  fight 
in  Springfield  and  in  the  streets  of  Chicago, 
led  by  the  brilliant  and  gallant  Logan,  ral 
lied  under  the  banner  of  the  Union  on  the 
bloody  fields  of  the  South. 

I  heard  the  last  speech  Senator  Douglas 
ever  made.  On  the  invitation  of  the  House 
of  Representatives  of  Illinois,  at  the  special 
session  in  April,  1861,  he  made  a  strong 
and  patriotic  appeal  for  a  united  effort  in 
resisting  the  attempt  of  the  slave  power  to 
destroy  the  Union.  His  towering  ambition 
to  become  President  (from  the  much  lower 
moral  plane  on  the  subject  of  slavery  than 
ihat  of  Mr.  Lincoln)  had  tumbled  to  ruin. 

136 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

I  have  a  vivid  recollection  of  the  appeal  he 
made  on  the  one  hand  to  the  Republicans 
to  use  with  moderation,  and  in  a  spirit  of 
conciliation  to  their  Democratic  opponents, 
the  control  they  had  come  to  have  in  the 
affairs  of  the  government;  and  on  the  other 
hand,  to  his  Democratic  friends,  "not  to 
allow  their  opposition  to  the  Republican 
party  to  turn  them  into  traitors  to  their 
country."  This  almost  startling  expression 
aroused  angry  feeling  in  many  Democratic 
members,  and  it  was  suppressed  in  the  print 
ed  speech,  but  I  was  sitting  near  him  and  I 
know  he  said  it.  Poor  man !  From  Spring 
field  he  went  home  to  Chicago,  soon  to  die 
in  the  full  prime  of  his  great  powers,  for  he 
was  only  forty-eight  years  of  age.  Often, 
often  since  I  have  thought  of  the  solemn 
words,  "Death,  death,  death,"  he  uttered  as 
he  lay  on  his  deathbed  in  the  old  Tremont 

137 


LINCOLN     —      By      MEN 

House  in  Chicago.  Had  he  not  died  he 
might  have  greatly  distinguished  himself  on 
the  fields  of  war,  and  finally  become  Presi 
dent  of  the  United  States. 

People  of  a  later  generation  can  have  no 
adequate  appreciation  of  the  intense  hostil 
ity,  and  even  hatred,  with  which  Mr.  Lin 
coln  was  regarded  by  his  political  opponents. 
We  who  lived  then  and  were  heartily  with 
him  in  his  efforts  to  maintain  the  Union 
could  see,  and  did  see,  that  many  of  them 
exulted  when  they  heard  that  he  was  killed. 
They  dared  not  much  to  show  it,  else 
they  themselves  would  have  been  killed. 
Blinded  by  intense  partisan  spirit,  and  blind 
to  the  fact  that  the  slave  power  had  long 
been  planning  either  to  make  it  lawful  to 
carry  their  slaves  into  every  quarter  of  the 
Union  or  to  dissolve  the  Union,  they  laid 
the  whole  trouble  at  the  door  of  those  who 

138 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

were  simply  resisting  the  further  extension 
of  slavery. 

The  principal  organ  of  these  opponents 
of  Mr.  Lincoln  in  Illinois  was  the  Chicago 
Daily  Times,  owned  and  edited  by  Wilbur 
F.  Storey.  On  the  first  day  of  July,  1 864, 
it  published  an  editorial  out  of  which  I  cut 
the  following  extract: 

"We  have  no  disposition  to  taunt  Ken 
tucky  in  her  present  condition,  but  if  this 
resolution  is  true  (referring  to  a  resolution 
of  the  Democratic  State  Convention  held 
on  the  28th  of  June)  we  must  infer  that  her 
people  are  not  free.  Democratic  news 
papers  are  not  permitted  to  circulate  in  the 
State,  and  she  is  deprived  of  the  other 
enumerated  essentials  of  a  free  government. 
She  is  not  thus  bound  because  her  sons  are 
'pigeon-livered  and  lack  gall  to  make  oppres 
sion  bitter,'  but  she  waits  and  hopes  that 
she  may  be  unfettered  without  resorting  to 
force  to  re-establish  law.  She  will  not  wait 
many  months,  nor  will  the  nation  delay  in 
rising  to  her  rescue  if  a  fraudulent  presi- 

139 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

dential  election  should  in  form  re-invest  Mr. 
Lincoln  in  his  present  office.  He  cannot  be 
fairly  and  lawfully  elected,  and  the  people 
have  determined  that  he  shall  not  hold  office 
if  elected  by  fraud.  He  could  not  be  more 
worthless  dead  than  he  is  living,  but  he 
would  be  infinitely  less  mischievous,  and  his 
corpse,  repulsive  as  it  would  be  in  its  freshest 
state  and  richest  and  most  graceful  habili 
ments,  would  yet  be  the  most  appropriate 
sacrifice  which  the  insulted  nation  could  offer 
in  atonement  for  its  submission  to  his  im 
becility  and  despotism." 

Who  could  doubt  that  that  man  Storey 
and  the  patrons  of  his  paper  rejoiced  in  their 
secret  souls  when  their  tool,  John  Wilkes 
Booth,  shot  Lincoln  down  on  the  night  of 
April  14,  1865?  When  General  Burnside 
was  in  command  of  the  department  of  Ohio, 
he  ordered  the  Chicago  Times  to  be  sup 
pressed.  Mr.  Lincoln's  "despotism"  was 
such  that  he  countermanded  the  order! 


140 


Recollections  of 
Abraham  Lincoln 

By  MR.  JOHN  W.  BUNN 

of  Springfield,  Illinois,  Related  in  a  Correspond 
ence  with  Isaac  N.  Phillips 


Recollections  of 
Abraham  Lincoln 

By  MR.  JOHN  W.  BUNN 

of  Springfield,  Illinois,  Related  in  a  Correspond 
ence  with  Isaac  N.  Phillips 


LETTER  OF  MR.  PHILLIPS 

Bloomington,  Illinois,  October  25,  1910. 
Mr.  John  W.  Bunn,  Springfield,  111. 

My  Dear  Sir:  You  have  often,  in  idle  hours 
related  to  me  your  recollections  of  Lincoln.  I  feel 
that  some  of  the  things  you  have  told  me  should 
be  preserved  in  a  permanent  form.  I  am  just 
now  helping  to  get  out  a  little  book  of  recollections 
of  Lincoln  by  a  number  of  men  who  knew  him  quite 
well.  I  am  sure  no  man  now  living  had  a  nearer 
view  of  Lincoln,  in  the  period  covered  by  the  last 
dozen  years  before  his  assumption  of  the  presi 
dency,  than  you  had.  I  am  further  sure  that  no 
man's  recollections  of  Lincoln  at  that  period  are 
clearer  or  more  reliable  than  yours.  You  are  not 
a  man  who  is  disposed  to  state  doubtful  things 
or  to  try  to  exaggerate  your  own  knowledge  of,  or 
143 


LINCOLN     —      By     MEN 

associations  with,  Mr.  Lincoln.    Others  have  been 
less  modest. 

Very  few  men  are  now  living  who  knew  Lincoln 
well  before  the  war — certainly  but  few  whose 
recollections  are  to  be  depended  upon.  I  am  per 
suaded  that  much  is  now  related  concerning  Lincoln 
that  is  of  very  doubtful  authenticity.  I  therefore 
feel  I  have  some  right  to  ask  you  to  put  in  form 
some  of  the  things  you  have  often  told  me  in  pri 
vate  conversation.  I  wish  you  to  state  what  kind 
of  a  man  Lincoln  was  socially,  and  what  kind  of  a 
man  he  was  as  a  politician,  if  he  was  a  politician. 
Please  embody  these  recollections  and  estimates 
in  a  letter  to  me,  so  I  may  preserve  them  in  a  per 
manent  form  and  give  them  publicity.  Some  errors 
which  have  crept  into  the  public  mind  may  thus 
be  corrected,  and  you  will  have  helped  to  give  the 
future  a  more  correct  view  of  the  most  interesting 
if  not  the  greatest,  character  of  modern  times. 
Very  truly  yours, 

Isaac  N.  Phillips. 


144 


WHO         KNEW        HIM 

LETTER  OF  MR.  BUNN. 
SPRINGFIELD,  ILL.,  Nov.  8,  1910. 
Isaac  N.  Phillips,  Esq.,  Bloomington,  III. 

My  Dear  Sir:  Your  request  that  I 
should  give  you,  in  a  letter,  some  of  my  per 
sonal  recollections  of  Mr.  Lincoln  and  my 
estimate  of  him,  both  in  a  social  way  and  as 
a  politician,  is  before  me.  My  answer  shall 
be  made  wholly  from  my  personal  knowl 
edge  and  observation  of  the  man.  I  shall,  of 
course,  not  try  to  exhaust  the  subject,  but 
will  give  you  a  little  of  Lincoln  as  I  saw  him 
and  as  I  knew  him.  If,  in  doing  this,  it 
should  appear  that  I  put  in  a  good  deal  about 
myself,  I  must  plead  as  an  excuse  that  I 
could  not  write  my  recollections  of  Lincoln 
without,  to  some  extent,  writing  about 
myself. 

I  was  born  in  Hunterdon  county,  New 
Jersey,  in  the  year  1 83 1 .     I  had  a  brother, 
Jacob  Bunn,  who,  in  the  year  1 840,  settled 
145 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

in  Springfield,  Illinois,  carrying  on  there  a 
wholesale  and  retail  grocery  business.  In 
1847,  when  I  was  in  my  sixteenth  year,  I 
came  to  live  in  Springfield  in  order  to  be 
with  my  brother,  and  I  have  lived  at  Spring 
field  ever  since.  In  1847,  when  I  came  to 
Illinois,  Lincoln  had  lived  and  practiced  law 
at  Springfield  for  ten  years  and  had  become 
somewhat  distinguished  throughout  the  State. 
In  fact,  he  was  then  serving  a  term  in  con 
gress  from  the  district  which  included  Sanga- 
mon  county,  Illinois.  My  early  contact  with 
Mr.  Lincoln  was  brought  about  by  the  fact 
that  he  was  my  brother's  regular  attorney. 
Almost  immediately  after  coming  to  Illinois 
I  began  to  know  Lincoln  in  such  a  way  as  a 
boy  knows  a  prominent  man  whom  he  often 
sees  and  talks  with. 

In  the  year  1853,  I  remember  that  Judge 
Douglas  made  a  great  political  speech  in  the 
State  House.  Lincoln  was  present  and 

146 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

heard  him,  and  gave  notice  that  he  would 
answer  Douglas,  one  evening  very  soon, 
from  the  same  platform.  It  was  a  way  Lin 
coln  had  to  talk  with  people  and  find  out  the 
views  they  took  of  current  events,  but  he 
seldom  or  never  asked  anybody's  advice. 
Accordingly,  the  next  day  after  Douglas 
had  made  his  speech  Lincoln  came  along  and 
stopped  to  talk  with  me  upon  the  sidewalk  in 
front  of  my  brother's  store.  He  said  to  me, 
"Did  you  hear  the  speech  of  Judge  Douglas 
last  night?"  I  answered  that  I  had  heard 
the  speech,  and  he  said,  "What  do  you  think 
of  it?"  I  replied,  "Mr.  Lincoln,  I  think  it 
was  a  very  able  speech,  and  you  will  have  a 
good  deal  of  trouble  to  answer  it."  To  this 
he  replied,  "I  will  answer  that  speech  with 
out  any  trouble,  because  Judge  Douglas 
made  two  misstatements  of  fact,  and  upon 
these  two  misstatements  he  built  his  whole 

argument.    I  can  show  that  his  facts  are  not 
147 


LINCOLN     —      By     MEN 

facts,  and  that  will  refute  his  speech."  I 
was  present  and  heard  the  reply  which  Mr. 
Lincoln  made  to  Judge  Douglas*  speech, 
and  to  my  mind  he  did  disprove  Douglas' 
facts,  and,  as  I  thought,  completely  answered 
his  arguments. 

When  Mr.  Lincoln  was  elected  to  con 
gress  in  1846,  he  was  the  only  Whig  con 
gressman  from  Illinois.  He  served  one  term 
in  congress  and  was  not  a  candidate  to  suc 
ceed  himself.  After  his  return  to  private 
life,  he  was  recognized  as  the  leader  of  the 
Whig  party  in  Illinois,  just  as  Judge  Doug 
las  was  recognized  as  the  leader  of  the 
Democratic  party  in  the  State.  These  two 
men  were  the  spokesmen  of  their  respective 
parties,  and  no  one  disputed  their  supremacy. 
Judge  Douglas  soon  became  the  leader  of 
the  Democrats  of  the  whole  North,  if  not  of 
the  South.  These  two  men  were  leaders 
both  in  debate  and  in  private  council. 

148 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

Although  the  Republican  party  first  be 
gan  to  take  form  in  1854,  it  was  not  fully 
organized  until  the  year  1856,  when  Fre 
mont  was  its  candidate  for  president.  Lin 
coln  and  Douglas,  as  leaders  of  their  par 
ties,  were  always  rivals  and  political  an 
tagonists.  Their  greatest  contest  was  when 
they  met  as  rival  candidates  for  the  Senate 
in  the  great  debate  of  1858.  Douglas  was 
successful  and  Lincoln  was  defeated,  but 
the  apparent  defeat  of  Lincoln  in  that  can 
vass  was  not  a  real  defeat,  for  in  that  cele 
brated  debate  he  laid  the  foundations,  broad 
and  deep,  for  his  success  over  Douglas  in  the 
great  presidential  campaign  of  1 860.  In  the 
latter  campaign  Lincoln  carried  Illinois 
against  his  rival. 

Lincoln  was  always  a  party  man  and  was 
careful  to  observe  and  to  control,  within  the 
sphere  of  his  influence,  every  detail  of  party 

organization.    He  was  always  in  close  touch 
149 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

with  the  leaders  of  his  party  in  the  State. 
The  primaries  in  his  own  ward  and  city,  the 
county  convention,  and  the  State  convention 
were  each  and  all  matters  of  deep  personal 
concern  to  him.  I  do  not  mean  that  he 
always  engaged,  personally,  in  all  the  de 
tails  of  local  campaigns,  but  the  men  who 
did  the  work  were  generally  in  his  confi 
dence,  and  were  men  who  were  glad  to  act 
upon  his  advice  and  suggestions.  All  these 
things  were  matters  which  Mr.  Lincoln  not 
only  took  pride  in  but  enjoyed,  just  as  any 
man  enjoys  the  things  that  he  does  well  and 
does  with  success. 

These  things,  which  I  state  as  facts  of  my 
own  knowledge,  certainly  show  that  Lincoln 
was  a  practical  politician,  but  he  was  not 
altogether  like  many  other  practical  poli 
ticians.  He  had  his  personal  ambitions,  but 
he  never  told  any  man  his  deeper  plans,  and 

few,  if  any,  knew  his  inner  thoughts.    What 

150 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

was  strictly  private  and  personal  to  himself, 
he  never  confided  to  any  man  on  earth. 
When  men  have  told  of  conversations  with 
Lincoln  in  which  they  represent  him  as  giving 
out  either  political  or  family  affairs  of  a  very 
sacred  and  secret  character,  their  tales  may 
be  set  down  as  false.  Furthermore,  Lincoln 
was  as  shrewd  and  unerring  a  judge  of 
human  nature  as  any  man  I  have  ever  known. 
He  understood  the  men  about  him,  and  he 
looked  through  and  through  them.  If  he  had 
been  going  to  do  a  thing  so  improbable,  so 
contrary  to  his  nature,  as  to  reveal  the  se 
crets  of  his  inmost  family  life  to  any  man 
whatever,  we  may  be  sure  his  great  knowl 
edge  of  men  would  have  enabled  him  to 
select  someone  who  could  be  trusted  not  to 
betray  his  confidence  to  the  world  almost  the 
moment  his  eyes  closed  in  death. 

What  I  have  said  of  Lincoln's  disposition 

to  keep  his  own  counsels  does  not  in  any  way 
151 


LINCOLN      —      By     MEN 

contradict  the  commonly  accepted  notion 
that  he  was  a  most  genial  man  and  that  he 
was  easily  approachable.  He  was  in  fact  a 
popular  man  with  all  who  knew  him  and 
was  generally  well  liked,  personally,  not  only 
by  his  own  supporters,  but  by  the  members  of 
the  party  opposed  to  him,  or  at  least  by  those 
members  of  the  opposing  party  who  were 
sufficiently  broadminded  not  to  be  very  bitter 
partisans. 

As  I  have  already  indicated,  Lincoln 
never,  to  my  knowledge,  sought  the  advice 
of  his  friends  and  associates  as  to  what  he 
should  do,  even  in  matters  of  great  impor 
tance.  However  sincerely  and  confidently 
Lincoln  may  have  worked  for  the  success  of 
his  party,  of  which  he  was  the  acknowledged 
leader,  neither  his  own  personal  interests  nor 
the  interests  of  his  party  ever,  in  my  judg 
ment,  to  any  extent,  controlled  his  political 

opinions  or  his  public  utterances.     Lincoln 

152 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

may  have  kept  many  things  to  himself,  and 
in  many  matters  it  may  be  said  he  was  secre 
tive,  but,  whenever  he  did  speak,  he  said 
what  he  really  thought.  He  never  dealt  in 
double  meanings  or  used  language  for  the 
purpose  of  concealing  his  opinions. 

When,  in  the  debate  of  1 858,  Lincoln  ad 
vanced  some  views,  and  said  some  things, 
which  aroused  the  protests  of  his  political 
associates,  he  was  undisturbed  by  the  criti 
cisms  that  were  made.  It  was  subsequently 
demonstrated  that  he  saw  further  and  more 
clearly  than  those  who  accused  him  of  ruin 
ing  his  own  prospects  and  making  trouble  for 
his  party.  On  this  occasion,  as  on  many 
others,  in  his  public  life,  he  relied  on  his  own 
judgment,  and  his  judgment  proved  to  be 
correct. 

Lincoln's  entire  career  proves  that  it  is 
quite  possible  for  a  man  to  be  adroit  and 

skillful  and  effective  in  politics,  without  in 

_io  153 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

any  degree  sacrificing  moral  principles.  Lit 
tle  men  try  to  do  the  same  things  he  did,  and 
make  very  bad  work  of  it.  They  lack  the 
high  moral  inspiration  that  animated  Lin 
coln.  Lincoln  presents  the  most  remarkable 
case  in  American  history  of  a  man  who  could 
be  a  practical  politician  and  at  the  same  time 
be  a  statesman  in  the  highest  sense  of  both 
terms.  Lincoln  was  a  high-minded  patriot. 
He  appreciated  intellectual  and  educated 
men,  but  he  was  at  the  same  time  a  com 
moner — a  man  of  the  people.  He  never, 
however,  went  out  and  told  the  people,  in 
terms,  that  he  was  one  of  them.  They  knew 
this  without  any  assertions  of  the  fact.  He 
was  always  ready  to  give  his  best  energies, 
and  finally  did  give  his  life  to  the  service  of 
his  country,  but  it  is  not  true  that  he  listened 
to  the  popular  clamor,  in  order  to  avoid  po 
litical  storms,  so  far  at  least  as  they  affected 

his  personal  interests  or  his  political  pros- 

154 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

pects.  If  what  he  said  or  did  did  not  meet 
with  popular  approval  he  had  the  patience 
and  the  foresight  to  wait  for  the  advance  of 
public  opinion.  He  did  not  doubt  his  own 
ability  to  see  great  situations  and  to  solve 
great  political  and  moral  questions,  and  he 
always  waited  with  perfect  composure  the 
ultimate  triumph  of  that  truth  and  justice 
which  was  his  high  and  only  aim. 

Between  1850  and  186 1,1  saw  Mr.  Lin 
coln  very  often.  I  am  proud  to  say  that  I 
was  one  of  his  junior  political  agents.  Like 
very  many  others,  I  was  always  glad  to  do 
for  him  anything  that  I  could  do.  I  was 
often  present  at  political  gatherings,  held  for 
the  purpose  of  consultation,  and  I  thus  came 
to  know  pretty  well  the  workings  of  his  mind, 
so  far  as  they  could  be  learned  from  close 
personal  contact  and  observation.  I  cer 
tainly  knew  something  about  his  personal 

bearing  and  concerning  the  attitude  of  others 

155 


LINCOLN      —     By      MEN 

towards  him.  I  never  heard  any  man  call 
Mr.  Lincoln  "Abe,"  and  he  certainly  was 
never  spoken  of  as  "Abe"  in  his  own  pres 
ence.  It  was  not  until  the  campaign  of  1 860 
that  I  began  to  hear  the  talk  about  "Abe" 
Lincoln  and  "Honest  Abe."  His  associates 
always  callled  him  "Mr.  Lincoln."  It  may 
be  that  sometimes  men  like  Judge  Logan, 
John  T.  Stuart,  Judge  Davis  or  Leonard 
Swett,  called  him  simply  "Lincoln."  His 
associates  treated  him  with  the  respect  that 
was  due  to  his  position,  and  he  always  be 
haved  with  dignity,  so  far  as  I  observed. 
Many  fictions  of  a  later  day  have  grown  up 
about  Mr.  Lincoln.  They  are  mostly  exag 
gerations  indulged  in  by  persons  who  delight 
in  telling  a  striking  tale,  and  not  infre 
quently  for  the  purpose  of  making  the  relator 
seem  important  in  his  relations  with  Lincoln. 
All  representations  of  Mr.  Lincoln  as  a 
clown  or  a  buffoon  are  false,  and  these 

156 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

things,  to  the  real  friends  of  Lincoln — men 
who  really  knew  him  well — are  very  offen 
sive.  I  have  always  felt  outraged  by  them. 

I  am  also  able  to  testify  from  knowledge 
that  Mr.  Lincoln  was  not  so  slovenly  in  his 
dress,  and  so  ungainly  in  his  appearance,  as 
many  have  represented  him  to  be.  He  was 
angular  in  his  person,  but  he  was  agile  in  his 
movements  and  far  less  awkward  in  his  mo 
tions  than  he  has  been  represented  to  be.  He 
always  seemed  to  me  to  be  as  neat  in  his  per 
son  and  clothing  as  the  common  run  of 
lawyers  at  the  Western  bar. 

The  impression  has  gone  forth  that  Lin 
coln  was  always  greatly  embarrassed  in  the 
presence  of  ladies,  and,  indeed,  that  he  sel 
dom  talked  to  ladies  at  all.  Now,  I  have 
repeatedly  seen  Mr.  Lincoln  in  social  gath 
erings  at  Springfield,  at  the  houses  of  promi 
nent  residents.  At  such  places  he  was  nearly 

always  surrounded  by  ladies,  who  took  spe- 
157 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

cial  delight  in  talking  to  him.  I  did  not  ob 
serve  his  great  embarrassment.  I  know  that 
it  may  be  said  generally  that  he  was  as  popu 
lar  among  women  as  he  was  among  men. 
Women  delighted  to  hear  him  talk,  and  he, 
to  my  certain  knowledge,  could  talk  very  in 
terestingly  to  them.  They  used  to  gather 
about  him  and  make  him  talk.  This  was  in 
Springfield  at  his  home,  and  all  I  say  of 
Lincoln  is  confined  to  the  period  before  his 
departure  for  Washington. 

In  the  year  1857  Mr.  Lincoln  asked  me 
one  day  if  I  did  not  wish  to  run  for  city 
treasurer  of  Springfield.  The  city  was  then 
an  almost  hopelessly  Democratic  city,  and 
the  proposition  rather  startled  me.  He,  how 
ever,  gave  me  encouragement  to  believe  that 
I  could  be  elected,  if  I  would  go  about  the 
matter  in  the  right  way.  My  brother,  Jacob 
Bunn,  who  was  present  at  the  time,  said  to 
Mr.  Lincoln,  "John  will  run  if  you  want  him 

158 


WHO        KNEW        HIM 

to."  The  candidate  of  the  Democrats  was 
Mr.  Charles  Ridgely.  I  confess  I  was 
pleased  with  the  idea,  and,  when  the  Re 
publican  city  convention  met,  I  was  an  in 
terested  auditor  of  the  proceedings.  I  ex 
pected  to  hear  my  own  virtues  extolled  in  the 
lofty  way  that  was  common  in  such  conven 
tions.  Lincoln  had  told  me  nothing  of  his 
plans  as  to  how  the  announcement  of  my 
candidacy  would  be  made,  or  in  what  man 
ner  I  would  be  brought  out.  The  conven 
tion  was  nearly  over,  and  I  began  to  think 
the  matter  of  my  nomination  had  been  for 
gotten.  In  a  city  so  Democratic  as  Spring 
field,  Republican  nominations  were  regarded 
at  best  as  rather  formal  and  perfunctory  mat 
ters.  Near  the  close  of  the  convention  a 
young  man — a  lawyer  who  was  an  inmate 
of  Lincoln's  office — addressed  the  chairman, 
and  said  he  would  like  to  make  a  nomination 

for  the  office  of  city  treasurer,  but  that  if  the 

159 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEM 

suggestion  he  should  make  did  not  meet  with 
the  favor  of  every  delegate  present,  he  would 
withdraw  the  name.  He  then  put  my  name 
in  nomination,  but  again  said,  "If  there  is 
any  delegate  on  this  floor  opposed  to  the 
candidacy  of  Mr.  Bunn,  I  do  not  wish  his 
name  to  be  voted  upon  or  to  go  on  the 
ticket."  No  one  objected  and  I  was  nomi 
nated  by  acclamation. 

When  I  saw  who  was  nominating  me  and 
knew  that  he  was  an  inmate  of  Mr.  Lincoln's 
office,  I,  of  course,  knew  very  well  that  he 
was  acting  under  Mr.  Lincoln's  orders.  The 
result  of  the  election  was  that  I  was  chosen 
for  treasurer,  and,  I  may  say,  I  was  again 
chosen  in  1858,  in  1859  and  in  1860.  In 
all  these  campaigns  I  was,  so  to  speak, 
"under  the  political  wing"  of  Mr.  Lincoln. 

A  day  or  two  after  my  first  nomination 
for  city  treasurer  I  was  going  up  town  and 
saw  Mr.  Lincoln  ahead  of  me.  He  waited 

160 


WHO         KNEW         HIM 

until  I  caught  up  and  said  to  me,  "How  are 
you  running?'*  I  told  him  I  didn't  know 
how  I  was  running.  Then  he  said,  "Have 
you  asked  anybody  to  vote  for  you?"  I 
said  I  had  not.  "Well,"  said  he,  "  if  you 
don't  think  enough  of  your  success  to  ask 
anybody  to  vote  for  you,  it  is  probable  they 
will  not  do  it,  and  that  you  will  not  be 
elected."  I  said  to  him,  "Shall  I  ask  Demo 
crats  to  vote  for  me?"  He  said,  "Yes,  ask 
everybody  to  vote  for  you."  Just  then  a 
well  known  Democrat  by  the  name  of  Rags- 
dale  was  coming  up  the  sidewalk.  Lincoln 
said,  "Now,  you  drop  back  there  and  ask 
Mr.  Ragsdale  to  vote  for  you."  I  turned 
and  fell  in  with  Mr.  Ragsdale,  told  him  of 
my  candidacy,  and  said  I  hoped  he  would 
support  me.  To  my  astonishment,  he  prom 
ised  me  that  he  would.  Mr.  Lincoln  walked 
slowly  along  and  fell  in  with  me  again,  and 

said,  "Well,  what  did  Ragsdale  say?    Will 
161 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

he  vote  for  you?"  I  said,  "Yes,  he  told  me 
he  would."  "Well,  then,"  said  Lincoln, 
"you  are  sure  of  two  votes  at  the  election, 
mine  and  Ragsdale's."  This  was  my  first 
lesson  in  practical  politics,  and  I  received  it 
from  a  high  source. 

In  the  year  1861 ,  when  it  was  about  time 
to  nominate  a  treasurer  again,  I  had  a  con 
versation  with  Mr.  Lincoln.  He  asked  me  if 
I  was  going  to  run  again  for  treasurer.  I 
said,  "Mr.  Lincoln,  do  you  not  think  that 
men  frequently  run  for  office  too  often  for 
their  own  good?"  He  replied,  "Yes,  they 
very  often  do."  I  gathered  from  this  that 
he  probably  thought  I  had  better  not  run 
again,  and  so  I  dropped  out  of  the  race. 

I  may  here  relate  a  little  incident  which  is 
characteristic  of  Lincoln.  During  the  time 
between  the  election  of  Lincoln  and  his  de 
parture  from  Springfield  to  go  to  Washing 
ton,  he  had  his  office  in  the  old  State  House 

162 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

—a  building  which  still  stands  on  the  public 
square,  though  it  has  been  repaired  and  a 
good  deal  changed.  I  was,  of  course,  very 
greatly  interested  in  the  campaign  in  which 
the  Republicans  had  succeeded  in  electing 
Lincoln.  I  was  on  a  local  committee  which 
had  charge  of  matters  in  Springfield  and 
Sangamon  county  and  was  treasurer  of  the 
committee.  One  day,  after  the  election  had 
resulted  successfully,  I  went  up  to  Mr.  Lin 
coln's  room  in  the  State  House,  and  as  I 
went  up  the  stairs  I  met  Salmon  P.  Chase 
of  Ohio  just  coming  away.  When  I  en 
tered  the  room  I  said  to  Mr.  Lincoln,  rather 
abruptly,  "You  don't  want  to  put  that  man 
in  your  cabinet."  It  was  an  impertinent  re 
mark  on  my  part,  but  Mr.  Lincoln  received 
it  kindly  and  replied  to  me  in  a  characteristic 
way,  by  saying,  "Why  do  you  say  that?" 
"Because,"  I  said,  "he  thinks  he  is  a  great 
deal  bigger  than  you  are."  "Well,"  said 

163 


LINCOLN     —     By     MEN 

Lincoln,  "do  you  know  of  any  other  men 
who  think  they  are  bigger  than  I  am?"  I 
replied,  "I  do  not  know  that  I  do,  but  why 
do  you  ask  me  that?"  "Because,"  said  Mr. 
Lincoln,  "I  want  to  put  them  all  in  my  cabi 
net."  This  is,  perhaps,  unimportant  talL 
but  I  think  it  shows  a  real  characteristic  of 
Lincoln  and  shows  that  he  was  not  afraid 
to  match  himself  against  other  men,  however 
prominent  they  might  be. 

I  always  had  a  deep  admiration  and  rev 
erence  for  Mr.  Lincoln  and,  of  course,  was 
very  active,  in  my  way,  in  forwarding  his 
candidacy  in  the  campaign  of  1 860.  After 
the  campaign  was  over  and  had  been  suc 
cessful,  I  was  once  in  Lincoln's  office  in  the 
State  House,  when  some  question  came  up 
about  my  having  spent  a  great  deal  of  time 
in  and  about  the  canvass  locally.  Lincoln 
asked  me  some  questions  which  brought  out 
the  fact  that  I  had  spent  a  good  deal  of  my 

164 


WHO         KNEW         H     I     M 

own  money  in  the  canvass — a  thousand  dol 
lars,  or  more.     Mr.  Lincoln  said  to  me  that 
I  was  not  able  to  lose  that  money.      He 
spoke  very  seriously.     I  replied,  "Yes,  Mr. 
Lincoln,  I  am  able  to  lose  it,  because  when 
you  go  to  Washington  you  are  going  to  give 
me  an  office."     This  statement  seemed  to 
almost  startle  him.     The  look  on  his  face 
grew  very  serious.     He  said  to  me  that  he 
had  not  promised  me  any  office  whatever. 
I  replied,  "No,  Mr.  Lincoln,  you  have  not 
promised  me  anything,  but  you  are  going  to 
give  me  an  office  just  the  same."     "What 
office  do  you  think  I  am  going  to  give  you?" 
asked  Mr.  Lincoln.     I  said,  "The  office  of 
pension  agent  here  in  Illinois.    During  Isaac 
B.  Curran's  term  as  pension  agent  under  Bu 
chanan   I  have  done  all  the  work  in  the 
office,  in  order  to  get  the  deposits  in  my 
brother's    bank.     The    salary    amounts    to 

$  1 ,000  a  year,  and  when  you  go  to  Wash- 
165 


LINCOLN      —      By      MEN 

ington  you  are  going  to  give  me  that  office." 
To  this  he  made  no  word  of  reply.  He  did 
not  say  he  would  give  me  the  office,  or  that 
he  would  not,  but  on  the  7th  of  March, 
1 86 1 ,  I  was  appointed  to  the  office  of  pen 
sion  agent  of  Illinois  by  Caleb  B.  Smith, 
Secretary  of  the  Interior. 

I  do  not  believe  that  anything  on  earth 
could  have  extracted  a  promise  from  Mr. 
Lincoln  to  give  me  that  office,  nor  do  I  think 
he  would  have  bargained  to  give  any  man 
an  administrative  office  before  or  after  his 
election.  It  is  probable  that  he  had  selected 
the  members  of  his  cabinet,  and  that  he  had 
advised  them  of  the  fact  before  they  were 
appointed,  but,  outside  of  his  cabinet  officers, 
I  do  not  believe  he  promised  anybody  an 
office  before  the  day  of  his  inauguration,  and 
yet  the  incident  I  have  above  related  shows 
that  he  was  not  by  any  means  insensible  to 
ordinary  political  considerations. 

166 


WHO        KNEW         HIM 

Lincoln  was  the  leading  lawyer  in  central 
Illinois  before  his  election  to  the  presidency. 
He  was  universally  respected  for  his  purity 
and  his  uprightness  and  for  the  rigid  integrity 
that  he  never  failed  to  exhibit  in  all  the  rela 
tions  of  life.  He  received  from  all  who  came 
in  contact  with  him  the  high  respect  and  con 
sideration  which  was  due  to  his  position 
and  to  his  great  ability  and  character. 

Very  truly  yours, 

JOHN  W.  BUNN. 


167 


14  DAY  USE 

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